“Hammersmiths’ what?” questioned Teddy, vacuously.
“Ball—ball,” said Octavia, viciously. “What were we talking of?”
“Eyes, I thought,” said Teddy, after some reflection; “and elbows.”
“Those Hammersmiths,” went on Octavia, in her sweetest society prattle, after subduing an intense desire to yank a handful of sunburnt, sandy hair from the head lying back contentedly against the canvas of the steamer chair, “had too much money. Mines, wasn’t it? It was something that paid something to the ton. You couldn’t get a glass of plain water in their house. Everything at that ball was dreadfully overdone.”
“It was,” said Teddy.
“Such a crowd there was!” Octavia continued, conscious that she was talking the rapid drivel of a school-girl describing her first dance. “The balconies were as warm as the rooms. I—lost—something at that ball.” The last sentence was uttered in a tone calculated to remove the barbs from miles of wire.
“So did I,” confessed Teddy, in a lower voice.
“A glove,” said Octavia, falling back as the enemy approached her ditches.
“Caste,” said Teddy, halting his firing line without loss. “I hobnobbed, half the evening with one of Hammersmith’s miners, a fellow who kept his hands in his pockets, and talked like an archangel about reduction plants and drifts and levels and sluice-boxes.”
“A pearl-gray glove, nearly new,” sighed Octavia, mournfully.