Elizabeth waited in despair of putting the case as she felt it.
"I was thinking," she said at last, "that if we have a whole land of forests to cut down and of cities to build up, somehow, everything will be different here from the Old England. I often wonder what it is to be in this New World. It must be unlike the Old," she repeated.
"I don't wonder," returned Katie, "and that's just what you shouldn't do. Wonder what you're going to wear to-morrow when we dine at Aunt Faith's, or whether Master Harwin will call this morning, or Master Waldo, or wonder about something sensible."
"Which means, 'or if it's to be Master Archdale,'" retorted Elizabeth, smiling into the laughing eyes fixed upon her face, and making them fall at the keenness of her glance, while a brighter rose than Katie cared to show tinted the creamy skin and made her bend a moment to arrange the rosette of her slipper. The movement showed her hair in all its perfection, for at this early hour it had not been tortured into elaborateness, but as she sat in her bedroom talking with her guest, was loosely coiled to be out of the way, and thus drawn back in its wavy abundance showed now burnished, and now a darker brown, as the sunlight or the shadow fell upon it.
"He's not always sensible," she answered, lifting her head again with a half defiant gesture, and smiling. Katie's smile was irresistible, it won her admirers by the score, not altogether because it gave a glimpse of beautiful teeth, or because her mouth was at its perfection then, but that it was an expression of childlike abandonment to the spirit of the moment, which charmed the gay because they sympathized with it and the serious because it was a mood of mind into which they would be glad to enter. "Stephen has not been quite himself lately, rather stupid," and she looked as if she were not unsuspicious of the reason.
"Too many of us admirers, he thinks?" laughed Elizabeth. "For he is bright enough when he takes the trouble to speak, but generally he doesn't seem to consider any one of sufficient importance to amuse."
"That is not so," cried Katie, "you are mistaken. But you don't know Stephen very well," she added. "What a pity that you are not living here, then you would, and then we should have known each other all our lives, instead of only since we went to school together. What good times we had at Madam Flamingo's. There you sit, now, and look as meekly reproving as if you had'nt invented that name for her yourself. It was so good, it has stood by her ever since."
"Did I? I had forgotten it."
"Perhaps, at least, you remember the red shawl that got her the nickname? It was really something nice,—the shawl, I mean, but the old dame was so ridiculously proud of it and so perpetually flaunting it, she must have thought it very becoming. We girls were tired of the sight of it. And one day, when you were provoked with her about something and left her and came into the schoolroom after hours, you walked up to a knot of us, and with your air of scorn said something about Madam Flamingo. Didn't it spread like wildfire? Our set will call that venerable dame 'Flamingo' to the end of her days."