I shook my head.
“Well, you do,” she snapped, “and if you have any more people to present to me, I want to know about them. . . . I positively snapped at this Mr. Wake—I am fearfully humiliated over it!—and just a word from you would have saved me.” (She slammed a bureau drawer shut until everything on the bureau top rattled), “I didn’t imagine he could be anybody, because Viola Harris-Clarke raved so—”
“He was my friend in any case,” I said, because I was getting mad, “and if you’d remembered that and been kind, you’d have spared both of us. I was ashamed of you—Mr. Wake was being kind to us, and you were rude to him without any reason for being so.”
“You ashamed of me?” she echoed, and wheeled on me, to stand looking at me in a dreadful way.
“Yes,” I said, “I was,” and I said it hard.
She drew a deep breath, and was about to start in when I decided I would go. I only heard her say, “You come from the backwoods of Pennsylvania, and so you cannot understand the—the infamy of your statement, but in New York I—my family—”
And into this I broke in with something that was horrible to say, I know it, but it was a satisfaction. I said, “Good-night old mud-hen,” and then shut the door. But before I had my own opened, she had jerked through hers, to stand in the corridor and wave her brush at me, “Never,” she called loudly, “Never call me ‘Mud-hen’ again!”
“I will if I want to,” I said. “You may count in New York, but I come from Pennsylvania.” And then I went in my room and felt ashamed.
For two days after that Leslie cut me out of her talking list, too, and the only words I had from her were icicle-hung requests to pass things. On the third, I went into the practice room that was farthest down the hall—my afternoon hours followed hers that day—and I found her with her head in her arms, crying.
I felt very sorry for her, and I put my hand on her shoulder, and I said, “Leslie,” quite softly, and she turned away from me for a moment, and then turned to me and clung to my arm. I patted her and smoothed her hair, and I think I made her feel a little better.