“You’re very unjust to me,” he said hotly. “I’ve known Nan ever since she was a child and never had any but a friendly feeling for her. I haven’t seen her for weeks. Now that I know how you feel toward me, I have no intention of seeing her.”
“I guess you won’t see her!” Farley snorted. “Not unless you mean to make her pay for it!”
Mrs. Copeland and Nan appeared at the bank entrance at this moment and witnessed the end of the colloquy. Copeland lifted his hat to Farley and walked rapidly away without glancing at them.
Farley became cheerful immediately, as he usually did after an explosion. This opportunity for laying the lash across Billy Copeland’s shoulders had afforded him a welcome diversion; and the fact that Copeland had seen his former wife in Nan’s company tickled his sardonic humor. He made no reference to Copeland, but began speaking of a new office building farther down the street. It was apparent that neither Nan nor Fanny shared his joy in the encounter and they attacked the architecture of the new building to hide their discomfort.
Nan appeared the more self-conscious. She was thinking of Billy. He had turned away from the machine with a crestfallen air which told her quite plainly that Farley had been giving him a piece of his mind. And Nan resented this; Farley had no right to abuse Billy on her account.
When they reached the house she took Fanny upstairs. If the glimpse of Copeland on the bank steps had troubled Mrs. Copeland she made no sign. Her deft touches with the comb and brush, as she glanced in the mirror, her despairing comments upon the state of her complexion, which, she averred, the summer suns had ruined; her enthusiasm over Nan’s silk waist, which was just the thing she had sought without avail in all the shops in town,—all served to stamp her as wholly human.
“But clothes! I hardly have time to think of them; they’re an enormous bother. And I wear the shoes of a peasant woman when I come to town, for I have to cut across the fields when I leave the interurban and I can’t do that in pumps! You see—”
The shoes really were very neat ones, though a trifle heavy for indoors. Nan instantly brought her shiniest pumps, dropped upon the floor and substituted them for Fanny’s walking-shoes. It flashed through her mind that Fanny Copeland inspired just such acts.
“You have the slim foot of the aristocrat,” observed Fanny. And then with a wistful smile she leaned toward the girl and asked, “Do you mind if I call you Nan?”
Nan was touched by the tone and manner of her request. Of course there was no objection!