"That means you don't want to go, Cally. You know it does...."
Cally confessed to a certain want of enthusiasm; asked her friend if she, too, didn't weary of their little merry-go-round at times. Nothing of the sort, however, would be admitted by Mats, who was now known to be having a really serious try for J. Forsythe Avery.
"Dear," she went on before long, "do you know you seem to be changing entirely lately? And toward me specially.... I--I've wondered a great deal if I've done something to offend you."
Cally embraced her; spoke with reassuring tenderness. And there was compunction in these endearments. She and Mattie had been intimate friends as long as she could remember; and now it had come over her suddenly that it would nevermore be with them quite as it had been before. Must life be this way, that greetings over there would always mean farewells here?...
And then Mats, quite mollified, was speaking in her artless way of Hugo Canning, who had so obviously been on her mind all along.
"People keep asking me," she said, still just a little plaintive, "and I have to say I don't know one thing. It makes me so ashamed. They think I'm not your best friend any more."
Cally observed that all that was too absurd. For the rest, she seemed somewhat evasive.
"I feel, dearie," said Mats, "that I ought to know what concerns your life's happiness. You don't know how anxious I've been about you while you were sick...." If there seemed a tiny scratch in that, the next remark was more like a purr: "People say that he did something perfectly terrible, and you threw him over."
"Well, Mats, you know people always get things exactly wrong."
"Then you didn't?" demanded her best friend, with a purely feminine gleam.