“It is all new-born, honorable, progressive and decent. Everybody seems to have a certain disdain for me. I believe it is because, if you will permit me to say so, I dress so well.”
His sister laughed.
“Not that they do not dress well! They do—astoundingly well; but they all dress alike, and you cannot tell, as in the case of your own servant, a lady from her cook, or a butcher boy on a holiday from the millionaire’s son, if he happens to come through town on foot or in a motor. Let’s agree, then, that I do look different. ‘The drug-store man’—that’s what you call him, isn’t it?—looked at me as if he hated me and my clothes when he gave me some calisaya. He thought I was a foreigner; they don’t like foreigners. If anything could put me on the same footing with my country people, this town street did, as far as it was able. By the time I got to the grocery I had forgotten that I had not seen America for thirty years, and that I was so different. Nothing remained but that country school feeling, that boy feeling. If you ask what I mean: There was a barrel of apples outside of the grocer’s door. I wanted to sneak one! I would have given fifty dollars for a glass of cider—for anything, in short, to keep up the game. I went in and asked him if he had such a thing as ‘sarsaparilla.’ He had it, and, in spite of my ‘difference,’ he pulled his cork and I drank the whole glass of that stuff. Pah! don’t ask me about it! It was all right, I don’t doubt; but when I left the corner and started up the hill, that wonderful sentimental feeling had entirely left me! There was only a wretched nausea—a complete sense of how far away I had gone from the simplicity of the whole thing, and I don’t say that I congratulated myself. Now, will you let me read, Agnes?”
But Mrs. Bellamy had turned to a servant who entered with a card—with two cards. “‘Mr. and Mrs. Warrener,’” she read aloud. “Oh, dear me, have you let them in?”
It appeared there was only a lady: “Mrs. George Warrener.”
“Heavens! I suppose that a lot of these people will call, and I must be more or less civil. Show Mrs. Warrener in—there is time to escape for you, Paul, by way of the dining room.”
CHAPTER VI.
The brightness of the room, the effect produced by the brilliant color of the decorations, and the atmosphere of livableness and charm did not dazzle the guest who entered—because she simply could not see! Her excitement was such that it caused a sort of blindness to fall on her, although she had never thought herself bashful or shy.
A lady, younger than herself, rose and welcomed her in a soft, quick voice, with a difference so marked in speech to any Mrs. Warrener had ever heard that she thought it was a foreign accent.