Better than her daughter, she envisaged the circumstances which might have led, in her Cousin Lucy's mind, to this young girl's visit. Lucy, herself, had been taken abroad in those early days by a competent aunt. Now Lucy, in the turn of the tide, was sending her daughter to America.
Jane Blair would have liked to play fairy godmother, to make a benevolent gesture, to scatter largess. . . .
But she was not going to have it said that she was a fortune hunter. She was not going to alarm Johnny Byrd and implicate Bob Martin and disturb the delicate balance between him and Ruth.
Lucy's daughter must take her chances. This wasn't Europe.
"Well, I've said enough to her," Ruth stated briskly, in answer to her mother's supposition. "I don't know how much she believes. . . . You know Ri-Ri is seething with Old World sentiment and she may be such a little nut as to think—but she doesn't act as if she really cared about it. It isn't just a pose. . . . Do you imagine," said Ruth, suddenly lapsing into a little Old World sentiment herself, "that she's gone on some one in Italy and they sent her over to forget him? That might account——"
"Lucy's letter didn't sound like it. She was very emphatic about Maria Angelina's knowing nothing of the world or young men. I rather gathered," Mrs. Blair made out, "that the family had a plain daughter to marry off and wanted the pretty one in ambush for a while—they take care of those things, you know."
"And I suppose if she copped a millionaire in the ambush they wouldn't howl bloody murder," said the girl, with admirable intuition.
"Oh, well——" She yawned and looked out of the window. "She's probably having the time of her life. . . . I'm grateful she turned out such a little peach. . . . When she goes back and marries some fat spaghetti it will give her something to moon about to remember how she and Johnny Byrd used to sit out and strum to the stars—— There he is now."
"Bob?" said Mrs. Blair absently, her mind occupied by her young daughter's large sophistication.
"Johnny," said Ruth.