“Why, this place. I don’t know what Aunt Sheila was thinking of!” then she dumped dozens of pairs of colored silk stockings out on the floor, and began to take out more and prettier dresses than I had ever seen before in all my life.
“How’d your frocks stand the crossing, dear?” asked Viola lazily.
“Oh, fairly. . . . Old rags anyway. . . . I didn’t get a new thing!” Then she leaned down again and began to take out perhaps a dozen petticoats that shone in the light, and silk night-dresses and bloomers and a pink satin corset, and gray suède shoes with cut-steel buckles, and some gold shoes with straps and ostrich feather rosettes on the ankles, and some dark blue patent leather shoes with red stitching, and red heels!
And as she did, she and Viola talked of people and places I had never met, and of how frightful the dinner had been, and of the “utterly hideous rooms!”
After quite a little time of this—although I suppose it seemed longer to me than it really was—Leslie sagged down on the corner of a trunk she had not yet opened, and hinted about some past chapters of her story that interested me and that was to have its love scene added in Florence, which I then, of course, didn’t know.
“I came here,” she stated, as she looked straight and hard ahead of her, “on pique.”
“I knew it!” murmured Viola.
“Nonsense!” Leslie answered, sharply. “Why how would you know?”
“Dear, I saw you were suffering—”
That smoothed Leslie; I could see her feathers settle, and when she went on all the irritation had left her voice.