Rena's experiment

by Mary Jane Holmes

“Well!” she began, a little sharply, and Rena, from her room, answered:

“Well?”

Then there was silence until Irene had unbuttoned her boots and kicked them off across the floor, when she continued:

“What did you think of him?”

After a moment Rena replied:

“It is evident he is not a ladies’ man, but he is a gentleman.”

“He may be a gentleman, but is the most awkward specimen I ever saw,” Irene rejoined. “Think how he sat in the parlor, with his neck bent forward in that dreadful chair, and his feet sprawled out in front of him.”

“That was the fault of the chair,” Rena said, and Irene replied:

“Why didn’t he take another? I tried to have him, and not make such a spectacle of himself, acting as if looking for some place in which to hide every time I spoke to him! I call him a muff, a stone, on whom I could not make the least impression. Small talk! He don’t know the meaning of the words, and I never spent a more stupid time than I did sitting there in the woods, trying to make him talk.”

Rena was bathing her face as she listened to this tirade and did not at once reply. She was rather happy than otherwise. She had made up with Tom, who had put himself on the same plane with herself in deception, and Tom’s good opinion was everything to her. He was her dear old Tom again, although it did not seem to her she could use that term as freely as she once had done. She could say it to herself and think it, but there had come over her a change removing Tom from her in one way and bringing him nearer to her in another, and the change had been brought about by contrasting him with Reginald Travers. She had watched the latter very closely. Nothing had escaped her, and while saying to herself, “I never could have loved him,” she had mentally made excuses for what seemed shy and awkward in him, and had felt a pity for him that he was being deceived, and a contempt for herself for deceiving him. “Tom was right; he is not the man to be tricked,” she thought, while the peculiar relation in which she stood to him made her wish to defend him against Irene’s attacks.