He was smiling at her, and she smiled back. Yet quite strangely and inconsistently, she felt as if in changing his attitude towards her, he had robbed her of some privilege. “I didn’t mind being a walking-stick.”
“Well, I minded. After this I’ll walk alone. And I’m going to work hard, and play around a bit. Will you have tea with me to-morrow, Jane? At the Willard? To celebrate my first tottering steps.”
She agreed, eagerly. “It will be like old times.”
“Minus a lot, old lady.”
That was the way he had talked to her years ago. The plaintive note was gone.
“Take the three-thirty train and I’ll meet you. I’ll pay for the taxi with what’s left of ‘Alice.’”
“Don’t be too extravagant.”
“Nothing is too good for you, Jane. I can’t say it as I want to say it, but you’ll never know what you seemed to me on Sunday as you came through the mist.”
His voice shook a little, but he recovered himself in a moment. “Here come the Townes.” He rose as Edith entered with young Baldwin.
After that Evans followed Baldy’s lead as a dispenser of hospitality. The two of them passed cups, passed thin bread and butter, passed little cakes, passed lemon and cream and sugar, flung conversational balls as light as feathers into the air, were, as Baldy would have expressed it, “the life of the party.”