“I never fish in shallow waters, Miss Wren.”
“You are the most shameless angler I know. But you do it so beautifully that people don’t realize what you are at.”
“Unconsciously—say unconsciously,” came a flash from the opposite chair.
“So I used to think. Before I really knew you I thought everything you said and did just happened so. But now I am not quite sure that you have not thought everything out beforehand.”
“Don’t make me out a horror.”
“Anyway you are much the cleverest creature I have ever met. You are so deep that there is no fathoming you. Somehow you are not the least ordinary in anything.”
Mary abruptly brought the conversation back to Sonny and his friend. The latter, it seemed, had first gazed on the famous Miss Lawrence in New York, at the Pumpernickel Theater, the previous year.
“An American?”
“No,” said Milly. “But he’s seen a lot of life out West.”
Before other questions could rise to Mary’s lips, Mrs. Wren came in. Milly’s mother was an elderly lady who had been on the stage. In the first flight of her profession, life had given her many a shrewd knock, but in the process she had picked up a considerable knowledge of the world and its ways. She lived for Milly, in whom her every thought was centered, for in the daughter the mother lived again. Intensely ambitious for her, Mrs. Wren was a little inclined to resent the intrusion within the nest of a bird of such dazzling plumage as Mary Lawrence. At the same time that honest woman well knew that her daughter had more to gain than she had to lose by sharing a roof with such a supremely attractive stable companion.