"After all," suggested Mrs. Clymer, more from the amiable design of steering the conversation within safe limits than out of any craving to exploit her own views, "after all, do we really know how these people feel? Is there one of us, for example, who ever had an intimate friend among them, a woman who worked with her hands?"
"Madelaide Dunbar told me once," remarked the youngest club member, "that she was fonder of her maid than of most of her friends."
"Which maid?" inquired another. "The one who took her pearl necklace?"
"Nobody took those pearls; Madelaide hid them herself, and forgot all about it, and then found them in her soiled-handkerchief bag! But it wasn't that one. This one had a little wave to her nose and her eyes were near together."
"Is she with Madelaide now?"
"I think she married. Madelaide was buying teaspoons the other day, and asking for rather light weight—maybe they were for her wedding present."
The South Carolinian smothered a smile. "Madelaide doesn't exactly count," said the hostess.
A new voice took up the theme, a sweet, rather diffident voice, to which, nevertheless, the circle listened with an attention that was almost distinction. She who spoke had been born in the little mid-Western city, and there she had spent her early youth, but she had married a rich man of the East, and was only a visitor to-day. The Ridgelys were people of importance; and Constance Ridgely, the only child, who never went to parties with boys, and only paid visits with her mother, and finally disappeared into vistas of fashion and intimacy with the peerage, was a person of mark. The more, that no splendid transformation had altered her affection for the town, or her gentle, almost shy modesty of manner. She flushed slightly now as she spoke. "The best, the dearest girl friend I ever had, used to work with her hands," said she.
The sudden silence was almost the dumbness of dismay; but the hostess sprang nimbly to the rescue with a murmur of "How picturesque!"
"Why, of course," cried Mrs. Clymer. "I wish you would tell us of it. You mean Nannie, don't you?"