Ethelwynne with her skates jingling over her arm came shivering into the room. “Oo-oo-ooh!” Her teeth chattered. “Wynnie’s freezing. Do shut that window and turn on the heat, Agnes. It is hard lines to live in a double with a regular Polar bear direct from the land of Sparta. You ought to keep it up as high as forty degrees anyhow.”
“Sh-h!” The smooth dark head at the desk bent lower over the water-color before her. “Don’t interrupt this minute. There’s a dear. I’ve got to catch this last streak of daylight——”
“But it isn’t daylight,” fretted Ethelwynne, “the moon’s up already. And I’m so chilly! I wish you would help me make some hot chocolate.”
“Look at the thermometer. Ah, one more stroke of that exquisite saffron on the stem! Hush, now. Look at the thermometer, look at the thermometer,” she muttered abstractedly while concentrating all her mental attention in the tips of her skilful fingers.
Ethelwynne stared at her a moment before giving a little chuckle that ended in a shiver. “Look at the thermometer, look at the thermometer,” she echoed sarcastically, “I reckon that’ll warm me up, won’t it? Like somebody or other who set a lighted candle inside the fireless stove and then warmed himself at the glowing isinglass. Suppose your old thermometer does say seventy or eighty or ninety or a hundred? Maybe it is telling a story. Why should I trust an uneducated instrument that has never studied ethics? Now listen here!” She lifted her skates and poised them to throw from high above her head. “Hist! if you don’t drop those hideous toadstools of yours and begin to sympathize with me this instant, I shall hur-r-rl this clanking steel——”
Agnes still painting busily raised one elbow in an attitude of half-unconscious defense.
“——upon the floor-r-r!”
At the crashing rattlety-bang Agnes sprang to her feet with a nervous shriek. Ethelwynne dived for her skates and felt them carefully. “I tried to pick out the softest spot on the rug,” she complained whimsically, “but there wasn’t any other way to wake her up. And I simply had to have some sympathy. Oo-oo-ooh, Wynnie’s freezing!”
Agnes had returned to her brushes and was wiping them dry in heartless silence.
“Wynnie’s freezing, I say.”