Yes, there she was,—in the guest-room bed of one of them.
She said, tranquilly: “It is kind of you to be interested in me. I feel it deeply, Mr. Annan. It seems wonderful to me, that a man so—a man like yourself—should have—have time to care what happens to a perfectly strange nobody.... But I can’t go home.... Not yet.... I shouldn’t care to live if I can’t have an opportunity to learn.... So—so that’s that.”
He, finally, laughed. “Is it, Eris?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling at him, “I’m afraid it is.”
“And that’s that,” he concluded.
“Yes, really it is.”
“All right.” He got up, stood fumbling with a cigarette. “All right, Eris. If ‘that’s’ the verdict, I guess I was wrong. I guess you know your business.”
“No. But I hope to.”
“You fascinatingly literal kid!——” He burst out laughing, went over and shook hands with her.
“Somebody else will have to milk the cows and feed the chickens. That’s plain as the permanent curls on your bobbed head, isn’t it?”