"I had no idea you were such a little enthusiast. Come, don't you want to have tea with me and my friend Mrs. Scot-Williams? I'm to meet her at the Carl. She enjoys a girl with ideas."
"In this?" I indicated my suit. We were drawing up to the lighted restaurant, where costly lace veiled from the street candle-lighted tables.
"In that?" Mrs. Sewall looked at me and smiled. "Talk as you have to me, my dear, and she will not see what your soul goes clothed in."
My enemy—Mrs. Sewall! My almost friend now! She could sting, but she could make honey too. Bittersweet. I went with her to drink some tea.
That was the beginning of our intimate relations. Mrs. Sewall invited me the very next day to lunch with her in the formal dining-room, with the Sewall portraits hanging all around. We talked more suffrage. It seemed to amuse her. She was not particularly interested in the woman's movement. It simply served as an excuse.
One stormy evening not long after the luncheon invitation Mrs. Sewall invited me to stay all night. She was to be alone and had no engagement. She asked me frequently after that. We slipped into relations almost affectionate. I discovered that Mrs. Sewall enjoyed my reading aloud to her. I found out one day, when her maid, who was an hourly irritation to her, was especially slow about arranging her veil, that my fingers pleased and satisfied. Often, annoyed beyond control, she would exclaim, "Come, come, Marie, how clumsy you are! All thumbs! Miss Vars, do you mind? Would you be so kind?" Often I found myself buttoning gloves, untangling knots in platinum chains, and fastening hooks.
As late fall wore into early winter, frequently I presided at the tea-table in Mrs. Sewall's library—the inner holy of holies, upstairs over the drawing-room. "Perkins is so slow" (Perkins was the butler) "and his shoes squeak today. Would you mind, Miss Vars? You're so swift and quiet with cups."
Once she said, in explanation of her friendliness: "I've never had anything but a machine for a private secretary before. Miss Armstrong was hardly a companionable person. No sense of humor. But an excellent machine. Oh, yes—excellent. Better at figures than you, my dear Miss Vars, but oh, her complexion! Really I couldn't drink tea with Miss Armstrong. I never tried it, but I'm sure it would not have been pleasant. You have such pretty coloring, my dear. Shan't I call you Ruth some day?"
Spontaneously it burst out. I had never had the affection of an older woman. I grasped it.
"Do, yes, do call me Ruth," I exclaimed.