“Oh, him?” she said. “Oh, that’s a chap I met on the train last summer. He’s a brakeman or something. He’s a—”
Perfectly unreluctantly Rae Malgregor dropped the fluff of lace and ribbons into Zillah’s lap and reached out with cheerful voraciousness to annex the young man’s picture to her somewhat bleak possessions. “Oh, I don’t care a rap who he is,” she interrupted briskly; “but he’s sort of cute-looking, and I’ve got an empty frame at home just that odd size, and mother’s crazy for a new picture to stick up over the kitchen mantelpiece. She gets so tired of seeing nothing but the faces of people she knows all about.”
Sharply Zillah Forsyth turned and stared up into the younger girl’s face, and found no guile to whet her stare against.
“Well, of all the ridiculous, unmitigated greenhorns!” she began. “Well, is that all you wanted him for? Why, I supposed you wanted to write to him. Why, I supposed—”
For the first time an expression not altogether dollish darkened across Rae Malgregor’s garishly juvenile blondness.
“Maybe I’m not quite as green as you think I am,” she flared up stormily. With this sharp flaring-up every single individual pulse in her body seemed to jerk itself suddenly into conscious activity again, like the soft, plushy pound-pound-pound of a whole stocking-footed regiment of pain descending single file upon her for her hysterical undoing. “Maybe I’ve had a good deal more experience than you give me credit for,” she hastened excitedly to explain. “I tell you—I tell you, I’ve been engaged!” she blurted forth with a bitter sort of triumph.
With a palpable flicker of interest Zillah Forsyth looked back across her shoulder.
“Engaged? How many times?” she asked bluntly.
As though the whole monogamous groundwork of civilization was threatened by the question, Rae Malgregor’s hands went clutching at her breast.
“Why, once!” she gasped. “Why, once!”