“You’re absolutely rude, Mr. Squire!” Millicent wanted to be placated.
He drew her out, and with skillful questions, sped with occasional compliments, he exposed her vanity. When she realized that, she retaliated—they understood one another, distantly still, and far beneath the surface of conversation.
As he continued to cut in—alternating, rather from politeness, with Carl’s sister Joan—the stags, in a tacit agreement, let him have her more and more to himself. Joan did not like that. It was ahead of her plans.
At supper Millicent saw to it that they were paired together. Looking distastefully at the noisy tables, where already the customary table-jokes were under way—spoons being laid in rows so that a tap on one sent another into a glass of water, and misappropriation of the salt and pepper (Bardy Cless and Evelyn Preston leading on the humorists), she feared that she might lose him there to Joan Twist.
“Let’s go outside and have our supper in a car,” she suggested. “There’s no room here.”
Tommy, politely overlooking the numerous empty places, was entirely willing. He got cake and sandwiches, and two plates with cups of coffee and chicken patties, and together they sped across the street to a parked limousine that stood almost in the shadow of the cathedral.
He told her, in the course of the next few minutes, that she was quite as lovely as any girl in Richmond. The darkness, and Millicent’s bare shoulder close against him, were effective.
And he was pleasantly surprised when he found that she had no desire to be kissed.
“Why, I’ve only known you for two hours,” she said, dropping lightly out of the car. “And besides, mother will be mad again when she finds that I’m not having supper at my own party. Last year Dick Cole and I drove down to the chicken shack, and mother almost passed away when we came back, eating drumsticks!”
They both forgot the débris of their supper, but later, after the party was over, a very angry matron discovered it when she sat in a plate of chicken, on entering her car to go home.