“Bevy? Who is Bevy?”
“Oh, that’s short of Berenice. It’s what Rolfe called her when he was a baby.”
“Bevy! I think that rather nice.”
“I always like it, too. Somehow it seems to suit her, and yet I don’t know why.”
Before dinner Berenice made her appearance, freshened by a bath and clad in a light summer dress that appeared to Cowperwood to be all flounces, and the more graceful in its lines for the problematic absence of a corset. Her face and hands, however—a face thin, long, and sweetly hollow, and hands that were slim and sinewy—gripped and held his fancy. He was reminded in the least degree of Stephanie; but this girl’s chin was firmer and more delicately, though more aggressively, rounded. Her eyes, too, were shrewder and less evasive, though subtle enough.
“So I meet you again,” he observed, with a somewhat aloof air, as she came out on the porch and sank listlessly into a wicker chair. “The last time I met you you were hard at work in New York.”
“Breaking the rules. No, I forget; that was my easiest work. Oh, Rolfe,” she called over her shoulder, indifferently, “I see your pocket-knife out on the grass.”
Cowperwood, properly suppressed, waited a brief space. “Who won that exciting game?”
“I did, of course. I always win at tether-ball.”
“Oh, do you?” commented Cowperwood.