"Do take her out, Henry," she said. "She's been on my nerves all evening."
So we went, and there was a girl in one of the pictures who had exactly the right hair arrangement. She had it loose and wavy about her face, and it blew about the way things do blow in the movies, and in the back it was a sort of soft wad.
It shows the association of ideas that I found my hand in Henry's coat pocket, and he grabbed it like a lunatic.
"You darling!" he said thickly. "Don't do that unless you mean it. I can't stand it."
I had to be very cool on the way home in the motor or he would have kissed me.
Mother and I went to a reception on the following Tuesday, and I wondered if mother noticed. She did. Coming home in the motor she turned and stared at me.
"Thank heaven, Kit," she said, "you still look like a young girl. All at once Ellie and the others look like married women. Earrings! It's absurd. And such earrings! I am quite sure," she went on, eying me, "that some of them had been smoking. I got an unmistakable whiff of it when I was talking with Bessie Willing."
Well, I had rinsed my mouth with mouth wash and dabbed my lips with cologne, so she got nothing from me. But I tasted like a drug store.
I am not smoking now. I am not doing much of anything. I—but I'm coming to that.
I'm no hypocrite. I'd been raised for one purpose, and that was to marry well. If I did it in my own way, and you think my way not exactly ethical, I can't help it. This thing of sitting back and letting somebody find you and propose to you is ridiculous. There is only one life, and we have to make the best we can of it.