“I wish to thunder I had married you!” he said savagely. “You’re the finest girl I know, Kit, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, and you are going to throw yourself away on Jack Manning, or Max, or some other—”
“Nothing of the sort,” I said coldly, “and the fact that you didn’t marry me does not give you the privilege of abusing my friends. Anyhow, I don’t like you when you speak like that.”
Jim took me to the door and stopped there to sigh.
“I haven’t been well,” he said heavily. “Don’t eat, don’t sleep. Wouldn’t you think I’d lose flesh? Kit”—he lowered his voice solemnly—“I have gained two pounds!”
I said he didn’t look it, which appeared to comfort him somewhat, and, because we were old friends, I asked him where Bella was. He said he thought she was in Europe, and that he had heard she was going to marry Reggie Wolfe. Then he signed again, muttered something about ordering the funeral baked meats to be prepared and left me.
That was my entire share in the affair. I was the victim, both of circumstances and of their plot, which was mad on the face of it.
During the entire time they never once let me forget that I got up the dinner, that I telephoned around for them. They asked me why I couldn’t cook—when not one of them knew one side of a range from the other. And for Anne Brown to talk the way she did—saying I had always been crazy about Jim, and that she believed I had known all along that his aunt was coming—for Anne to talk like that was sheer idiocy. Yes, there was an aunt. The Japanese butler started the trouble, and Aunt Selina carried it along.
Chapter II. THE WAY IT BEGAN
It makes me angry every time I think how I tried to make that dinner a success. I canceled a theater engagement, and I took the Mercer girls in the electric brougham father had given me for Christmas. Their chauffeur had been gone for hours with their machine, and they had telephoned all the police stations without success. They were afraid that there had been an awful smash; they could easily have replaced Bartlett, as Lollie said, but it takes so long to get new parts for those foreign cars.