Rhinoscerairus!”
He advanced into the drawing room, where Katherine now stood alone, and drew out the last syllable of his absurd song into a long bleating wail that sent her into convulsions of laughter till the tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Tears, idle tears——”
began Justice, picking up a vase from the table and holding it under her eyes, and then he stopped, as if struck by a sudden recollection. “I said that to you once before,” he said, “don’t you remember? The first time we really got acquainted with each other. You were standing by the stove, weeping into the apple sauce.”
“It was pudding,” Katherine corrected him, with a little shamefaced laugh at the remembrance, “huckleberry pudding. And I streaked it all over my face and you nearly died laughing.”
“Well, you laughed too,” Justice defended himself, “and that’s how we got to be friends.”
“That seems ages ago,” said Katherine, “and yet it’s only a little over a year. What a year that was!”
Both stopped their bantering and looked at each other with sober eyes, each thinking of what the trying year at Spencer had been to them. Justice’s eyes traveled over Katherine, and he, too, noticed that she was much better looking than when he first knew her. Katherine noticed the admiration dawning in his eyes and divined his thoughts. After Gladys’s spontaneous outburst of approval she knew beyond any doubt that her appearance no longer offended the artistic eye. The knowledge gave her a new confidence in herself, and a thrill of pleasure that she had never experienced before went through her like an electric shock. At last people had ceased to look upon her as a cross between a circus and a lunatic asylum, she told herself exultingly.
“Well, what are you thinking about?” she asked finally, as Justice continued silent.
“I was just thinking,” replied Justice gravely, “about the difference in plumage that different climates bring about.”