Mrs. Baron did not stop to take in any of the others. At first she was speechless, as the saying is, though she was trying to shape certain comments which she meant to direct at Bonnie May.
She opened her mouth once and again quite helplessly. Then she found her voice.
“You little—limb of Satan!” The words came with difficulty. In that instant her features looked quite unlovely. Bonnie May might have told her that elderly people ought never, under any circumstances, to become violently angry. But Bonnie May was in no condition to utter elemental truths.
“You awful little—wretch!” added Mrs. Baron. “No sooner do I turn my back than you disgrace me! You open my door to—the whole street!”
Bonnie May was blinking rapidly. She was very pale. If you dreamed that you were finding large sums of money, and some one threw a bucket of cold water on you, and you woke up to find yourself in the poorhouse—that perhaps fairly describes her mental state.
She had not been quite sorry that the bed collapsed. Some of the secondary cells in her brain had been warning her, as she stood on the “bridge,” that the third act could scarcely be made to come to a true climax. She couldn’t be projected into the sea really. She would have to step tamely down from the table and begin to talk in a commonplace fashion.
Under favorable conditions the collapse of the bed would have been a relief.
But now she stood looking at Mrs. Baron trying to reach her soul through her angry eyes. She shrank so from being humiliated before her friends—the old and the new. If Mrs. Baron, who had been so kind in many unimportant ways and times, could only spare her now!
“If you will permit me, madam—” began Clifton.
“Who are these—gentlemen?” demanded Mrs. Baron, still wrathfully regarding Bonnie May—Bonnie May and no other.