And Gladys-Marie, coming round the corner of the porch just in time to see Knollys’s answer, stole noiselessly back into the house with Marmaduke. A conscientious person, Gladys-Marie, though, after all, merely a maid.
IV
SHEILA—SIMPLY A SOCIETY PERSON
“She’s the sweetest thing in the world”—Doromea looked up extenuatingly from a large hole in Timothy’s best socks that she was darning—“and ever so lovable, Sheila, but——”
“Just a born butterfly, that’s all,” continued Ellen, for the moment abstracted from dish-towels piled up before her to be hemmed, “a captivating will-o’-the-wisp creature, made to have things done for her—even thought for her; a——”
“Simply a society person!” Patsy sat triumphantly upright, with the air of having nutshelled the whole argument. “Can you imagine Sheila, sitting here on Ellen’s porch, with anything but a bridge score or a cup of tea in her hand? Fancy her making baby-clothes!” There was a pitying smile for the defrauded Sheila as Patsy bent again over the filmy microscopic thing that she was stitching.
“She did do that clever little sketch for us to act at Anne’s last Christmas,” suggested Ellen, doubtfully. It was partly through Sheila that Ellen had come into possession of her own; through Sheila’s very superficiality that Ellen’s desire for a house had crystallized. She looked about the cool shaded porch and into the wide, charming rooms of which she was chatelaine, and sighed contentedly. “If only one could make her a bit more self-realizing——”
“Make her see that she is just a Plain Person.” Doromea was biting thread. “Timothy says that’s where society people disparage themselves—they’re always imagining themselves something extraordinary. But the bewildering part about Sheila is that she doesn’t imagine herself at all; she simply pays no attention to herself.”
“Hasn’t time,” Patsy explained, succinctly. “She’s always at the Suffrage Club or at the theatre—you know, Dorry, she told Anne she fairly lived in the theatre—or off with Hawley somewhere. Of course I’m terribly fond of Hawley—he’s an excellent person, really, and makes one the most delicious things to drink; but as a husband—well, of course he isn’t like Warren.”
“Or Knollys.”
“Or Timothy!”