“Cigarettes are a party to me,” she exclaimed. “If I could afford to smoke I might not care for it at all, but I can’t, so when I want to be extravagant I smoke; it’s just a symbol.”
Now that Dorothy seemed to have put her grief into the background Ruth was beginning to feel restless. On the following day the party was to leave for the Christmas party. They would arrive at their destination on the twenty-third of December and the imminence of the solution of all Ruth’s worries, for either good or evil, made her feel that she should be at the house as much as possible. Could she have done so she would have followed Gloria wherever she went. Most of all she wanted to find out where Professor Pendragon was stopping; and she ought to telephone Terry again to remind him not to forget the revolver. In her own mind she was not exactly sure what she would do with the gun when she got it.
“I think I’ll have to run along,” she said.
“Oh, and we were having such a good time. I was beginning to be quite cheered up. Wait a minute; that’s him.”
Regardless of grammar, Ruth knew that the masculine pronoun could refer to only one person. Down three flights of stairs she could hear a tuneless but valiant whistle.
“I wonder why he’s coming home so soon?” continued Dorothy. “I’ll shut the door tight so he won’t see us. I’m not going to make it easy for him to come back.”
She closed the door as she spoke and the two girls waited, trying to keep up a hum of conversation. Dorothy’s agitation communicated itself to Ruth.
“Will he come here?” she asked.
“I don’t know; he always did before, but now, he may just be coming in to get something and then dash out again to meet her.” She walked to the window and looked out:
“There’s no one down there waiting for him.” She came back to her place at the tiny table.