As she met his eyes she smiled and said, as though he had spoken, “Yes, isn’t it pretty?” Then she added, “But I am a gourmand. I like the pretty surroundings and a good dinner, but if I had to choose between the two, I would take the latter.”
“That’s because you are such a child,” he said patronizingly.
“Of course, judging from the standpoint of your experience, I must appear like one,” was her lofty reply.
Her remark reduced him to an awkward consciousness of his inexperience, and beside this small girl he felt himself suddenly to seem like an uncouth school-boy.
After this little encounter they listened to the conversation of their elders. Mrs. Malloy was expressing her opinion of a new book which she did not like, and said that people were better off with no books at all than with one of that character.
Mrs. Weston, who had never delved very deep into any subject, said with a little giggle: “I would hate to acknowledge, though, that I had not read a book of which every one was talking. But I have often heard Meg express herself the way you have been doing.”
After they were back in the drawing-room Robert said to Margaret, “Did I understand your aunt to call you ‘Meg’?”
“You did,” was the reply; “I have as many names as Eugene Field’s ‘Bill,’ in the little poem ‘Jes ’fore Christmas.’ You remember it?”
He nodded.
“Well, it’s this way with me: Father called me Margaret, the girls they called me Peg, Mother called me Margie, but Auntie calls me Meg.”