"Say, would you have licked that fellow the other night, honest?"
"Well, if he was disrespectful to a lady——" Peter began.
"Oh, excuse me!" She turned her head aside for a moment in her long gloves. "You are country!" she said again, but it seemed not to displease her. "I don't care so much for her voice, do you?" She turned on the singer. They discussed the entertainment and the dinner. They were a long time about it. The orchestra played a waltz at last, and Ethel—she had told him to call her that—put her arms on the table and leaned across to him, and though Peter knew by this time that her cheeks were painted, he didn't somehow mind it.
"What's it like up in the country where you lived?" she wished to know.
"Hills mostly, little wooded ones, and high pastures, and the apple orchards going right up over them...."
"I know," she nodded. "I guess it's them I been smelling ... or laylocks."
"Things coming up in the garden," Peter contributed: "peonies, and long rows of daffodils...." He did not realize it, but he had described to her no place that he had known but the way to the House. The girl cut him off.
"Don't!" she said sharply. "You know," she half apologized, "you kind of remind me of somebody ... a boy I knew up country. It was him that got me here——" She made her little admission quietly, the horror of it long worn down to daily habit. "That first time I saw you, it seemed almost as if it was him ... I ain't never blamed him—much. He didn't mean to be bad, but when the trouble came he couldn't help none.... I guess real help is about the hardest thing to find there is."
"I guess it is."
"Oh, well, we gotta make the best of it." She glanced at Peter with her head on one side as she twiddled her fingers across the cloth to the tune of the orchestra.