"I've told you almost everything," she said brightly. "I'd rather hear about you. It's twice as exciting as my humdrum accounts of myself. Tell me about your studio at home. Is it so gorgeous as the peacock panels that Constance Fellows is doing for you?"
"It's hardly gorgeous, but it's rather good." Rosamond's interest was plainly forced. "Constance is getting on with them, is she? I must see them in the morning. How do you like her? I suppose you have heard that she is very eccentric. She refused to live in a perfect palace with an aunt of hers, merely because the aunt objected to her going to life class. Fancy her giving up such a life for a mere trifle."
"She didn't feel that it was a trifle, I suppose," replied Patricia lightly. She did not sympathize with Rosamond's view of the matter, but she had learned in this short hour to steer her bark away from the shoals.
"I think she showed very little judgment," said Rosamond, selecting a bonbon with care. "She should have lived peaceably with her aunt and had her own models in her own studio, and she'd have been comfortable and the aunt would have been happy. There is always a way of doing as one wishes if one will only take the trouble to look it up."
Patricia hid her uneasy feelings as best she could, but her face was never hard to read, and Rosamond shook her head at her with the slow smile curving her red lips.
"You think me a monster of deceit," she accused. "Your big eyes are quite horrified at such shallow cunning. Don't worry, my dear Miss Kendall. I'm not half so bad as you think me."
Patricia flushed. "I know you are far above any such mean doings," she said stoutly, "but I wish you wouldn't talk that way. It makes me feel—but I'm not going to be such a goose as to preach. Do go on about the yachting trip. You were in the middle of it when dinner came in."
Rosamond, always graceful, responded readily enough, and the evening sped rapidly. Patricia had enjoyed herself tremendously, as she very truthfully told her hostess when she said good-night and shut herself into her own snug little room, and she looked forward to the morrow with Rosamond Merton with a thrill of pleasure.
She could not help wondering, though, as she shook out the kinks and tangles of her bright hair, why she had not told about the Sunday evening supper in the studio, nor the spread in Ethel Walters' room.
"I must be getting terribly secret and crafty," she thought with some surprise. "I suppose that's the effect of being thrown with so many strangers all at once."