“What fool nonsense is this?” he demanded. “What in the world possessed you, Kit, to put yourself in such an equivocal position? Unless”—he stopped and turned a little white—“unless you are going to marry Jim.”
I am sorry for Max. He is such a nice boy, and good looking, too, if only he were not so fierce, and did not want to make love to me. No matter what I do, Max always disapproves of it. I have always had a deeply rooted conviction that if I should ever in a weak moment marry Max, he would disapprove of that, too, before I had done it very long.
“Are you?” he demanded, narrowing his eyes—a sign of unusually bad humor.
“Am I what?”
“Going to marry him?”
“If you mean Jim,” I said with dignity, “I haven’t made up my mind yet. Besides, he hasn’t asked me.”
Aunt Selina had been talking Woman’s Suffrage in front of the fireplace, but now she turned to me.
“Is this the vase Cousin Jane Whitcomb sent you as a wedding present?” she demanded, indicating a hideous urn-shaped affair on the mantel. It came to me as an inspiration that Jim had once said it was an ancestral urn, so I said without hesitation that it was. And because there was a pause and every one was looking at us, I added that it was a beautiful thing.
Aunt Selina sniffed.
“Hideous!” she said. “It looks like Cousin Jane, shape and coloring.”