Pamela, who had been carefully instructed by her husband to attend strictly to her own business, found it difficult to refrain from remarking upon Eva's looks, but she began the conversation with the determination to be very guarded and to only skim the surface.
"Are you really going to stay all summer?" she inquired casually, as she folded her parasol and tossed it with her gloves on a convenient chair in the breakfast-room, where Eva had just been taking coffee and toast. "Paul and I get off to-morrow. Mother took the baby last week; it's abominable in the city now."
"Well, you see we're not in the city," Eva drawled, "and Johnstone's been interested in the tariff. Besides, I suppose we'll go to Florida this winter and—" she shrugged her shoulders—"what's the use?"
Pamela stretched out an absent-minded hand and, picking up a strawberry from the cut-glass dish on the table, dangled it by its green stem. "I suppose you like to be here on Rachel's account; she isn't going away, is she?"
"I'm sure I don't know; I suggested the pyramids of Egypt."
Pamela clung to the surface. "There are such horrible cockroaches on those Nile boats," she observed.
"I can't imagine why people here have made such a fuss about Rachel's marriage," said Eva fretfully. "One would think a bomb had exploded; they seem to catalogue it with murder and sudden death."
Pamela looked vacant. "Do they? You know I've been simply taken up with trying to keep John Charter with us; Paul and I offered all sorts of inducements but he wouldn't stay."
"Good gracious, hadn't you Mrs. Prynne? I thought they were engaged."
"Nonsense! Imagine John marrying a paper doll! I don't know who started that report unless it was Mrs. Billop."