And Emily wrapped about her shoulders a wisp of georgette. And when the girl took a step forward with all the sunlight shining through her, and Emily saw through the sheer thing long pink legs, she suddenly realized why Bob had said indignantly that he would as soon meet her naked in the hall as in that thing.
She laughed and said, "Eve, you really ought to have a thicker dressing gown!"
"I have got one," Eve assured her. "I had to get one. Dad wouldn't go on the Pullman with me till he saw I had one. I hate a lot of cotton flannels."
"Crêpe de Chine would do."
"I know it. But it's sort of dowdy—crêpe de Chine. Put Martha's on me. I'll bring my own Victorian down to-morrow."
Very quick to take a suggestion, properly made, Eve was. A gratifying girl to befriend, if a puzzling one. When Bob had grumbled that he didn't see any use sending a girl to college who didn't know enough to wear clothes, Emily had replied:
"Oh, that girl is as good as gold, Bob. They all wear thin things in the halls, Martha says." Emily liked her. To be sure, the ease with which she had taken up her permanent abode at the Kenworthys' was somewhat—nonplusing. Emily had asked her, when Martha first brought her home, where she had been brought up. And she had said: "Oh, I never was brought up at all. I'm just the little prairie flower, growing wilder every hour. Just hauled about from aunt to boarding-school—between the devil and the deep sea all my tender days." Though she had said it so frankly, so seriously, Emily had thought it scarcely sufficient. But Martha had hooted at Emily's quizzings. "It's too funny the way you act, mother, as if maybe she wasn't fit to associate with your precious child. At school I'm simply nothing. I'm the least worm in the apple. But Eve's everything. The profs just eat out of her hands. She's chairman of the student council—you know—the gang that makes us all behave. She edits the magazine, and she'll be president of her class next year, as like as not. At school everybody wants to get a stand in with Eve. She'd never looked at me if her dad hadn't moved to this town. And now you don't know whether I better make her acquaintance or not!"
"You know I didn't mean that, child. I simply asked who she was and where she had lived. That's only natural. I think she's a dear."
And Emily had been reassured because it was her theory that women never again have such a capacity for judging one another rightly, and choosing friends wisely, as they have in college. No girl, she thought, looking at Eve's thin, rather over-bred face, fools a campusful of her companions. Bob said her father was always well spoken of. No one knew him very well. He had bought a great elevator in town some time ago, one of several he had in the state, and recently had bought a large old house and settled his family in it. That had consisted of his old bedridden mother and her nurse—until Eve's vacation had begun. Martha had gone at once to see her there, and, coming back, had said to Emily: "It's a funny sort of house, mother. It's furnished all right, and everything. But it looks like an orphan asylum." She had asked Eve to come and stay the night, and Eve had accepted gladly. Her grandmother, she told Emily, had been "out of her head, mildly" for months. Her nurses weren't very easy to get along with. "Dad had a hard enough time getting any he can trust grandma to," she had said, very sensibly. "He's away so much. These two are awfully good to her. I'll say that for them. They're sisters. So why should I come home for three months and ball everything up? I just keep still as a mouse and let them have their own way. Grandma never knows me. I never go into the room."
Well, that was a nice sort of place for a young girl to spend her holiday, Emily had thought. "Stay with us," she had suggested. And she hadn't had to suggest it twice. Bob grumbled every day about this steady boarder, but that didn't excite Emily unduly. She liked Eve better and better. How sweet of her now, to think of doing those cherries! She was always doing little things that Martha would never have thought of.