Accordingly, the stage calling the next morning found three passengers awaiting its arrival, and the keenly observant driver, who occasionally turned his head, and proffered an observation, in case the conversation languished, must have formed an entirely new conception of girls of seventeen. Had they all been seventy, and the merest acquaintances, they could not have treated one another with more precise politeness, nor have conversed with greater decorum. Altogether, Priscilla had some show of reason for referring later to the drive as “ghastly.” Unluckily, Claire’s train was thirty minutes late, and the tension was accordingly prolonged for that length of time. As Peggy attempted to make conversation out of such material as the weather and the time Claire would reach home, Priscilla was reflecting that if she were obliged to wait much longer she would disgrace herself either by laughing or by crying, or by indulging in both diversions at one and the same moment.
But the whistle sounded in time to save Priscilla’s hardly tried self-control. The girls shook hands primly. Peggy and Priscilla wished Claire a pleasant journey. Claire replied by effusive thanks. At length, to the relief of all three, she handed her suitcase to an obsequious porter and stepped aboard the Pullman.
“Now be ready,” Peggy cried, clutching Priscilla’s arm. “Wave your hand if she looks out.” But Claire did not deign so much as a glance at her late companions, and the train which bore her out of the heart of the green hills, carried her forever out of the lives of the two who watched her departure.
The girls seated themselves on one of the station benches to await Elaine’s train. Peggy was a little sober, for unjustified as she knew Claire’s suspicions to be, she could not help asking herself how it was that she had gained so little of Claire’s confidence in a summer’s association. And Priscilla’s face, too, was overcast, but for a different reason.
“Peggy,” she exclaimed abruptly, “do you know I feel as if I’d been looking at myself in the mirror.”
“Then you ought to feel more cheerful than you look,” returned Peggy with a sweeping glance, and a smile, designed to express her conviction that Priscilla was an unusually handsome girl.
But Priscilla was not to be turned aside by the little compliment. “It isn’t any reason to be cheerful. I mean, Peggy, that this affair with Claire has just helped to show me what I’m like myself.”
Peggy broke into excited protests, to which Priscilla listened unmoved.
“It’s exactly the same thing. I’ve been jealous of Elaine in just the same way she has been jealous of you. And both of us called it love, when all the time it was just the meanest kind of selfishness. I wonder why it is that your faults never look very bad till you see them in somebody else.”
“If you imagine that you’re like Claire Fendall,” interjected Peggy, seething with indignation, “you’re badly mistaken, that’s all.”