“I’ve had visitors this morning,” she told him, with purpose.
“Ah! people are sure to be curious and interested,” he commented.
“They were Mrs. Dodge and her daughter and Mrs. Dix and Ellen,” she explained.
“That must have been pleasant,” he murmured perfunctorily. “Are you—do you find yourself becoming at all interested in the people about here? Of course it is easy to see you come to us from quite another world.”
She shook her head.
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “—If you mean that I am superior in any way to the people of Brookville; I’m not, at all. I am really a very ordinary sort of a person. I’ve not been to college and—I’ve always worked, harder than most, so that I’ve had little opportunity for—culture.”
His smile broadened into a laugh of genuine amusement.
“My dear Miss Orr,” he protested, “I had no idea of intimating—”
Her look of passionate sincerity halted his words of apology.
“I am very much interested in the people here,” she declared. “I want—oh, so much—to be friends with them! I want it more than anything else in the world! If they would only like me. But—they don’t.”