“Let me go, dear,” Keble had risen.
“We’ll go together,” Louise proposed, and Miriam noted an eager light in his eyes.
On the snowy road he tucked his glove under Louise’s arm, and they picked their way across in silence to the drug-store.
When she had obtained the photographs and thrust them into an inner pocket of his coat, they returned more slowly towards the hotel.
“It will seem very strange,” he said, “without you and the monkey. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am at your refusing to come home with me.”
“A change from us will do you good . . . You’re to give my love and the monkey’s to everybody, and tell them I’m looking forward very much to their visit.”
Keble stopped in the middle of the deserted street, to face her with appealing eyes, and rested a hand on her arm. “Weedgie, that’s all so pathetically trite, for you! Tell me, sans facons, why wouldn’t you come, and why wouldn’t you let me take the snapshots of you as well as the monkey?”
She was a little timid. This was the Louise with whom he had originally fallen love, and whom he remembered even through her noisiest performances. “Because I’m perverse. I want your people, if they are going to make my acquaintance at all, to get their first impression of me in my own setting.” She couldn’t confess that she would have been gratified if his people had been a few degrees more pressing in their invitations to her. “If they like me in spite of it, or even if they don’t, I shall feel at least square with myself. But if they were to find me passable in their setting, then come out here and pooh-pooh the Valley, I should be—oh, hurt and angry.”
Keble shook her gently. “Rubbish!”
“Mrs. Windrom thought me crude,” she said, entirely without rancor. In her heart she thought Mrs. Windrom crude.