“I’m going to get that position!” she announced, “it’ll do me worlds of good—” (It did!) “And mother is satisfied to stay with Aunt Clarice—she entertains all the time, you know—and I am going to wear an orchid chiffon frock, made up over silver cloth, perhaps, and Signor Paggi says I will sometimes be expected to bow too, and that Madame Heilbig will pay me well, and I mean to save—because Leslie says all her income comes from money her father saved—it is the only safety for a single woman, and capital is really the husband of an old maid, don’t you know? Or would you wear lavender? I thought of a brocade, and I could wear artificial violets because they would look like real ones back of the footlights, and with my name, they might be sort of romantic, and I can wear violet too, and—”
I sat and listened, and honestly she went on for a half hour like that. Then she said, “Hear about Ben Forbes?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Simply romantic!”
“Um hum—”
“Taking him to the Boboli Gardens, and all that—artful, you know. . . . Think of having a proposal in one of those arched-over pathways in that heavenly place! Oh!”
“Probably won’t,” I said.
“He will too,” Viola disagreed, “she’ll fix it! . . . Look here, did you hear about his cook!”
I hadn’t, and I said so quickly, because I was interested.
“In the letter before this last one,” said Viola, “I think it came yesterday, he told Leslie—oh, in detail, my dear!—about his ranch, and the way the ranch house looked and all that. Made it frightfully attractive, told her about the patio, what is a patio, anyway?”