"Lilah is always saying things that she doesn't mean, Dad. Please don't take her seriously."
"Nobody takes me seriously," said Lilah, "and that's why nobody knows me as I really am."
"I know you," said her father, "and you're like a little mare that I used to drive out on the ranch. As long as I'd let her have her head, she was lovely. But let me try to curb her, and she'd kick over the traces."
They all laughed at that; then their tea came, and a great plate of toast, and the conversation grew intermittent and less interesting.
Yet the man at the other table had his attention again arrested when Lilah said to Porter, as she drew on her gloves:
"We are invited to Mary Ballard's for Thanksgiving, and you're to be there."
"Yes—mother and father are going South, so I can escape the family feast."
"Mary Ballard is—charming——" It was said tentatively, with an upward sweep of her lashes.
But Porter did not answer; and as he stood behind her chair, there was a deeper flush on his florid cheeks. Mary's name he held in his heart. It was rarely on his lips.
Mary had not wanted Delilah and her father for Thanksgiving. "But we can't have Leila and the General without them," she said to Barry, after a conversation with Leila over the telephone, "and it wouldn't seem like Thanksgiving without the Dicks."