"She wore heliotrope satin. Ornaments, diamonds. Great, wasn't it? One of our girls brought down a book this morning about lady Guinevere. Guinevere—your grandmother! What are we to Lady Guinevere, or what is Lady Guinevere to us? But when it comes to people living in your own town, why, that's getting down to business."
"Yes, let us talk about realities—Balzac."
"I should say so," she assented, missing the allusion. "Now then, why shouldn't I be wearing heliotrope satin to dinner sometime?—if not under the name of Cornelia McNabb, then under some other as good or better. Anyway, I'm going to keep my hands as nice as I can; a girl never knows what she may have a chance to become. I don't imagine it will disfigure me much to run a typewriter. Dear me," she sighed, "how much time I've lost! If I hadn't been such a darned goose, I might have begun Pitman at home a year ago."
She reached down under the counter and pulled a newspaper up out of a dark corner.
"Some lunch-rooms have papers around—as many as a dozen, sometimes; but Duggan says this place is too cramped for him to give people any inducement to dilly-dally. It's eat and run. So I have to buy my own. This is the first chance I've had to look at it. I wonder what she's been up to now."
She opened the paper and ran down its columns with an expert eye.
"Yes, here she is, first pop. Mr. and Mrs.—Cluett, Parker, Ingles. My sakes, how I envy that woman! Course I don't want that she should come down here and wash my dishes, but wouldn't I like to go up there and eat off of hers! What did she wear?—it don't tell. Where was it?—at Mrs. Walworth Floyd's—a small dinner. Don't know them. How about the Misses?—Jameson, Parker, Wentworth—she's a great goer, too. And here are a few Messrs.—Johnson, J. L. Cluett, George Ogden—"
She stopped abruptly.
"You?"
There was a world of reproach in her voice.