After we got back from our walk and were settled at dinner, Viola, with a circumspect look at Leslie, said something about Mr. Wake’s books, and I saw Leslie look up at her suddenly and piercingly. And before I went to bed she called me over to her room. She had on a layer of mud—it was some kind of Russian stuff that she put on to cleanse the pores—and it made her look like a mummy. I had to giggle.
“What is the cause of your mirth?” she asked coldly as she stopped brushing her hair.
“Well,” I answered, “you look kind of funny.”
She elevated her chin, and I think she gave me that cool stare with which she even occasionally subdues Miss Meek, but of course it couldn’t get through her mud-pie finish.
“I want to know,” she said after a second of comparative silence, during which she had slammed her little jars around on her bureau, and brushed her hair so hard that I thought she’d brush it all out, “whether it is true that Mr. Wake is a writer?”
“Why, yes,” I answered, “‘Beautiful Tuscany,’ ‘Hill Roads,’ ‘Old Roman Byways’ and lots more were written by him.”
It seemed to irritate her. “It would seem to me,” she confided, “that you would naturally mention it!”
I didn’t see why, but I didn’t say so. I just picked up a button hook and wiggled it around in my hands, the way you do when you have nothing to do but feel uncomfortable.
“You lack finish, and are as gauche as any one I ever knew,” she went on. I didn’t know just what she meant by that, but I knew I didn’t like it.
“Don’t you know that when you introduce people,” she questioned, “you should give some idea of the—the standing of each person so that—that they may know whom they shall be nice to?”