On such occasions, while she undid her pretty muslin dress, unpinned the flowers she was never without, and loosened her gold-brown hair, which she had put up for the evening: while she undressed, Evelyn had to submit to a rigorous cross-examination. Laura demanded to know where she had been, what she had done, whom she had spoken to; and woe to her if she tried to shirk a question. Laura was not only jealous, she was extraordinarily suspicious; and the elder girl had need of all her laughing kindness to steer her way through the shallows of distrust. For a great doubt of Evelyn's sincerity had implanted itself in Laura's mind: she could not forget the incident of the "mostly fools"; and, after an evening of this kind, she never felt quite sure that Evelyn was not deceiving her afresh out of sheer goodness of heart, of course—by assuring her that she had had a "horrid time", been bored to death, and would have much preferred to stay with her; when the truth was that, in the company of some moustached idiot or other, she had enjoyed herself to the top of her bent.
On the night Laura learned that her friend had again met the loathly "Jim", there was a great to-do. In vain Evelyn laughed, reasoned, expostulated. Laura was inconsolable.
"Look here, Poppet," said Evelyn at last, and was so much in earnest that she laid her hairbrush down, and took Laura by both her bony little shoulders. "Look here, you surely don't expect me to be an old maid, do you?—ME?" The pronoun signified all she might not say: it meant wealth, youth, beauty, and an unbounded capacity for pleasure.
"Evvy, you're not going to MARRY that horrid man?"
"Of course not, goosey. But that doesn't mean that I'm never going to marry at all, does it?"
Laura supposed not—with a tremendous sniff.
"Well, then, what IS all the fuss about?"
It was not so easy to say. She was of course reconciled, she sobbed, to Evelyn marrying some day: only plain and stupid girls were left to be old maids: but it must not happen for years and years and years to come, and when it did, it must be to some one much older than herself, some one she did not greatly care for: in short, Evelyn was to marry only to escape the odium of the single life.
Having drawn this sketch of her future word by word from the weeping Laura, Evelyn fell into a fit of laughter which she could not stifle. "Well, Poppet," she said when she could speak, "if that's your idea of happiness for me, we'll postpone it just as long as ever we can. I'm all there. For I mean to have a good time first—a jolly good time—before I tie myself up for ever, world without end, amen."
"That's just what I hate so—your good time, as you call it," retorted Laura, smarting under the laughter.