"It is so vulgar to be unpunctual," said Adelaide with her calm good-breeding. "It seems to me only another form of uncleanliness and disorder."
"And Edgar is so punctual too!" cried Josephine by way of commentary.
Adelaide smiled, not broadly, not hilariously, only to the exact shade demanded by conversational sympathy. "Then we shall agree in this," she said quietly.
"Oh I am sure you will agree, and in more than this," Josephine returned, almost with enthusiasm.
Had she not been the willing nurse of this affair from the beginning?—if not the open confidante, yet secretly holding the key to her younger friend's mind and actions? and was she not, like all the kindly disappointed, intensely sympathetic with love-matters, whether wise or foolish, hopeful or hopeless?
"Who is it that you are sure will agree with Miss Adelaide, if any one indeed could be found to disagree with her?" asked Edgar, standing in the doorway.
Josephine laughed with the silliness of a weak woman "caught." She looked at Adelaide slyly. Adelaide turned her quiet face, unflushed, unruffled, and neither laughed sillily nor looked slyly.
"She was praising me for punctuality; and then she said that you were punctual too," she explained cheerfully.
"We learn that in the army," said Edgar.
"But I have had to learn it without the army," she answered.