I think he considered me an interfering chit, as I was, and hated me; but he couldn’t very well strangle me, and I could walk quite as fast as he, so he replied, crisply, coolly, as before, but replied: “Since it interests you,” he answered, “certainly.”
Then I explained that she was sick. I said she had lived in a place where money was thought most important, and among people who attached a false value to it. And I said that that had made her sick mentally and that he should give her a chance and help her through that quite as he would through anything that made her body as miserable. He stopped and faced me.
“She is changing,” I said. “She is sorry, and she has cried before me about you.”
He caught his breath and then said: “Oh, my dear!” But he wasn’t speaking to me, I knew, but to Evelyn.
“She’s at home,” I went on, “and alone, or will be, since you can order Amy off. And she will love seeing you. She has cared so much that I think that has kept her from getting over this cold. I know it.”
He didn’t speak, but gripped my hand, and then he turned and hurried back toward the place where we had met. And I knew where he went from there, before I got home, and Amy told me about it.
I went on feeling sort of silly. The whole thing had taken lots of nerve, and if I hadn’t cared so much for Evelyn I never would have done it. I hate explaining what I think about the values of love and things. It makes me feel wishy-washy. So I was glad to be diverted by meeting S. K. He was in his car, and leaned out and told me to get off the grass!
“Can’t you see the signs?” he asked, as I turned to see where the loud order came from.
“Get in here,” he ordered next, and then his chauffeur, who grins and seems more human than other people’s chauffeurs, helped me across the snow-bank, and I was by S. K. He asked me if I’d minded the heat, and how many vanity cases I expected Santa to give me, and then he said he had got me a present and that I’d better sit tight or he’d give it to the janitor.
I looked at his chauffeur’s uniform and asked him where he got his servants’ duds.