The girl in gray crossed the track quickly and addressed the two women cordially. Taylor’s back was to her and he was growing eloquent in a mild well-bred way over the dullness of our statesmen in not seeing the advantages that would accrue to the United States in fostering our shipping industry. His wife, her sister and the girl in gray were so near that I could hear plainly what they were saying. They were referring apparently to the girl’s refusal of an invitation to accompany them to California.
“So you can’t go—it’s too bad! We had hoped that when you really saw us on the way you would relent,” said Mrs. Taylor.
“But there are many reasons; and above all Sister Theresa needs me.”
It was the voice of Olivia, a little lower, a little more restrained than I had known it.
“But think of the rose gardens that are waiting for us out there!” said the other lady. They were showing her the deference that elderly women always have for pretty girls.
“Alas, and again alas!” exclaimed Olivia. “Please don’t make it harder for me than necessary. But I gave my promise a year ago to spend these holidays in Cincinnati.”
She ignored me wholly, and after shaking hands with the ladies returned to the other platform. I wondered whether she was overlooking Taylor on purpose to cut me.
Taylor was still at his lecture on the needs of our American merchant marine when Pickering passed hurriedly, crossed the track and began speaking earnestly to the girl in gray.
“The American flag should command the seas. What we need is not more battle-ships but more freight carriers—” Taylor was saying.
But I was watching Olivia Gladys Armstrong. In a long skirt, with her hair caught up under a gray toque that matched her coat perfectly, she was not my Olivia of the tam-o’-shanter, who had pursued the rabbit; nor yet the unsophisticated school-girl, who had suffered my idiotic babble; nor, again, the dreamy rapt organist of the chapel. She was a grown woman with at least twenty summers to her credit, and there was about her an air of knowing the world, and of not being at all a person one would make foolish speeches to. She spoke to Pickering gravely. Once she smiled dolefully and shook her head, and I vaguely strove to remember where I had seen that look in her eyes before. Her gold beads, which I had once carried in my pocket, were clasped tight about the close collar of her dress; and I was glad, very glad, that I had ever touched anything that belonged to her.