"Oh—so so," said Georgia fretfully. "Newspaper work is a thankless job."
"Why, Georgia, I thought you loved it so."
"Oh, yes,—yes, in a way, I do. But it's thankless. And you never get anywhere. You break your neck one day, and then there's nothing to do the next, but start in and break it again. You're never any better to-day for yesterday's killing. Now with you—when you paint a good picture, it stays painted."
"Why don't you get married?" asked Ernestine, innocently.
"Married! Pooh—that would be a nice thing!"
"Indeed it would. If you care for the man."
Georgia was fidgeting; it was plain she wanted to talk about marriage, if she could do so without seeming to be vitally interested in the subject.
"I mean it, Georgia," Ernestine went on. "If you care for him, marry him."
"Care for whom?" Georgia demanded, and then coloured and laughed at the folly of her evasion. "Well, the fact of the matter is," she finally blurted out, "I don't know whether I do or not. Now, in a way, I do. That is, I want him to care for me, and I shouldn't like it if he sailed away to the Philippine Islands and never showed up again, but at the same time—well, I don't think even you could get up much sentiment about paper bags, and besides"—tempestuously—"the name Tank's preposterous!"
Ernestine laughed. "What are those terms the lawyers are so fond of—immaterial, irrelevant, and something else? Georgia, once when I was a little girl and went to visit my grandmother, I had a stubborn fit and wouldn't eat any dinner because the dining-room table had such ugly legs. And the dinner, Georgia, was good."