“Miriam . . . before I throw a bun at you!”
“Well, my dear, you invited the woman to pay you a visit.”
“Jolly kind of me, too. Is that all?”
“Heavens, it’s enough!”
“I was merely returning a hospitality,—the hospitality of your friends.”
“Don’t tease.”
“After all, what less could I do when she practically gave us her house and her chauffeur and her marble staircase and diamond bracelets and ancestral lemon groves in California.”
“None of which we wanted, you see. Nor asked for a thing! Nor accepted a thing except under compulsion. The mere fact that one strays into a house that looks like a glorified Turkish bath and has it, as you say, given to one, doesn’t put one under the slightest obligation. We merely sat on the edge of her golden chairs, regretted Elsa’s absence, heard about Mr. P.’s kidneys and sundry organs, and drank a cup of tea.”
“And ate a cream puff. Don’t slight that delicious, cordial, luxurious, fattening, vulgar cream puff. I ate two and longed for a third. That made it a grub-call, and I had to invite her back. I’ll never outgrow that primitive custom. Besides, I took care to say, if she was ever in my part of the world. That made it pretty safe.”
“Ah, that’s just what made it an error. Not only because it was gratuitous, but because Mrs. Pardy is the sort of woman who would charter a private train to be in your part of the world in order, accidentally, to drop in on a young woman who makes the sort of impression you make,—for you do, you know. Especially when she finds out,—and be sure she’ll investigate,—who the Eveleys are.”