“He is a gentleman, every inch of him; and I won’t quarrel with him any more,” she thought, as she walked up to the Friary. “Oh, how nice it would have been if we were still at Glen Cottage and he could see us at our best, and we were able to entertain him in our old fashion! How Carrie and the other girls would have liked him! and how jealous Dick would have been! for he never liked our bringing strange young men to the house, and always found fault with them if he could,” and here Phillis sighed, and for the moment Mrs. Trimmings was forgotten.
CHAPTER XXIII.
“BRAVO, ATALANTA!”
Phillis received quite an ovation as soon as she crossed the threshold. Dulce, who was listening for her footsteps, rushed out into the little hall, and dragged her in, as though she were too weary to have any movement or volition of her own. And then Nan came up, in her calm elder-sisterly way, and put her arm round her, and hoped she was not so very tired, and there was so much to say, and so much to do, and she wanted her advice, and so on.
And on Nan’s forehead lay a thoughtful pucker; and on the centre-table were sundry breadths of green silk, crisp-looking and faintly bronzed, like withered leaves with the sun on them.
“Oh, dear! has Miss Drummond been here in my absence?” asked Phillis, with the overwhelmed feeling of a beginner, who has not yet learned to separate and classify, or the rich value of odd moments. “Three dresses to be done at once!” 168
“One at a time. But never mind Miss Drummond’s this moment. Mother is safe in the store-cupboard for the next half-hour, and we want to know what you mean by your ridiculous message, ‘Trimmings, not Squails.’ Dulce is dying of curiosity, and so am I.”
“Yes; but she looks so hot and tired that she must refresh herself first.” And Dulce placed on her sister’s lap a plate of yellow plums, perfectly bedded in moss, which had come from the vicarage garden. And as Phillis enjoyed the dainty repast and poured out her morning’s experiences in the ears of her astonished auditors, lo, the humiliation and the sting were forgotten, and only an intense sense of the humor of the situation remained.