Then the man flicked the ash from his cigarette, turned lazily in his chair and raised his hand as a signal to a servant who was hovering over a table and who hurried to him in response. He spoke to the servant and inclined his head slightly in John's direction. The servant bowed and came toward John's table.
"If you're not a guest here, sir, you will kindly leave the grounds," he said.
John felt his blood gush through his veins. He saw the man in the wicker chair smile mildly and look up into the branches of the tree overhead. He overcame a wild impulse to step over and ruin the perfect hair.
"But it happens I am a guest," he said, as clearly as his choked back temper permitted.
"You are, sir!" the servant pretended astonished humiliation. "Would you be so good as to say by whose invitation?"
Then it happened. John afterwards was never quite sure what would have taken place there had it not occurred.
To John she seemed to have blossomed up out of the ground before them. He never saw anyone who looked more like a flower, a delicate, beautiful flower. She was in white, a quaint frock with ridiculously tiny puffed sleeves reaching only halfway to her elbows, gathered in with a narrow black ribbon. Something about her, the way she looked, the dress, the whole expression of her face, sent the thought "an old-fashioned girl" coursing through John's brain.
The servant stepped back.
"Do you happen to be the newspaper reporter—?" she said.