“Hello! if here isn’t—let me see—not Jean, of course, but—oh, yes, Ray, to be sure. I’m great on mixing names. It is a good while since I’ve seen you, though.”
Ray helped him by reminding that she was away from home on the occasion of his visit three years before.
“That’s so,” he said, briskly. “I remember all about it now; you are the oldest girl, of course. Bless me! Elsie, think of Joe’s oldest being a fresh young girl yet in her teens.”
Ray, in all the dignity of her twenty years, only laughed; Uncle Evarts never really desired information, and she felt that he neither knew nor cared how old she was. Words flowed on.
“It is bewildering, anyhow; here is Dick sprung up in the night like a mushroom! I should never have known him in the world if he hadn’t claimed me for an uncle. By the way, Dick, what is it to be? law, medicine or theology?”
But Derrick, every line of his pressing annoyance, muttered something about not being absolutely driven toward any of them, and made his escape under cover of his mother’s entrance. She had emerged from the “oven” with her face much flushed and a dab of flour on her left cheek. Her brother-in-law effervesced again at sight of her.
THE STREAM OF COMPLIMENT WAS STILL FLOWING
“Upon my word, Louise, I can’t see that you look much older than you did the day Joe brought you home a bride. How do you contrive to cheat old Father Time so successfully? Look at those cheeks, Elsie.”
“They must be reflecting the cook stove,” Mrs. Forman managed to say, while the stream of compliment was still flowing.