“Not a bit of it. We’re all very much pleased with you.”
There may have been something of patronage in the tone. At any rate, she replied with a little smile: “Thank you. You know an artist always strives to please.” As he regarded her quietly she added more earnestly: “It’s strange that I got by, too, when you come to think about it. I was hardly prepared to play a nice part when I came here. Anyway, not a part where you have to have so much—what the critics call restraint. You can take it from me, the nice parts aren’t half as fat as the nasty parts.”
He did not remove his eyes from her face. He had the thought that she was very far away from him, after all. From all of them. “I wish,” he said, “you wouldn’t always talk as if you were only taking part in a play. Somehow it doesn’t seem quite friendly. We’re trying to make this a real home for you. We’re trying to be real friends. We’re trying to live a real life. Why not look at it that way when you’re with me? Wouldn’t that seem friendlier?”
She looked at him with a little flicker of anxiety in her eyes. “You see,” she said, “I can’t help thinking all the time that everything I do must be like a nice ingénue part, and being afraid that you’ll come home some day and find I’ve been doing some soubrette stuff.”
He shook his head and abruptly assumed a new attitude. “Did you understand me clearly when I said that Mrs. Thornburg wishes you to visit her?”
“I think I didn’t pay much attention,” she admitted, looking away from him. “Did you—wish me to go?”
“I think it would be very nice. If you didn’t like them, you needn’t ever go again.” He tried to speak lightly.
She brought her eyes to his now, anxiously. “When did you think I ought to go?” she asked.
Baron brought his chair down with a bump. “I didn’t say you ought to go, exactly. Don’t put it that way. I only thought it would be nice and kind of you to go, because they wish it. I’d be anxious to have you come back quite soon, of course.”
“And—and mother: does she wish me to go, too?”