As they left the drawing-room they were met at the door by two other young misses who, at sight of them, raised their chins considerably above their natural level, and swept in without condescending to bestow even an accidental glance upon them. From where I sat I observed all this quietly, and with an effort to suppress a smile of bland amusement, I arose and greeted my new-comers—the Merivales! Alice glided towards me with an air of imposing consciousness, and thrust a tiny, gloved hand into mine, and then with a graceful gesture she turned towards her companion and murmured faintly, "my cousin, Miss Holgate—Miss Hampden."
I bowed and smiled, and directed them to convenient seats, the situation was becoming more and more trying to my inclination to laugh outright. When we were all three comfortably deposited in our chairs, Alice Merivale turned her beaming countenance languidly towards me and remarked that "it was a perfectly lovely aufternoon," and while I smiled my eager corroboration, her cousin surreptitiously observed, that it was "fairly delicious."
Then followed exclamations over my long absence, and questions too numerous ever to require answers, they were much more finished talkers than their predecessors, and when I thought we had touched upon every subject which could interest us mutually, Alice asked in a most insinuating tone if I had "known Florrie Grant before I went away to to school?"
Florrie and Carrie Grant were the slighted heroines who had just gone out. Fully alive to the import of her question, I affected a most placid expression of countenance and voice, and answered that I had not.
"I thought so," she remarked with an incisive smile, looking significantly at her cousin, then changing her tone to one of most provoking haughtiness, she drooped her white lids over a daintily plush satchel she held between her hands and drawled out a languid
"How do you like her?"
I felt that I was taking in Miss Merivale's tone and words and meaning with a wincing suspicious glance. I was being initiated, and the sensation was so utterly different from anything I had ever experienced before, that my self-control suffered a momentary suspension, when words came to me I used them with a particular emphasis.
"I think I shall like her very much," I answered, "when I have seen more of her. I never like to judge people according to early impressions," I continued, looking straight at the ottoman before me, "because people so often appear to disadvantage at first," but my arrow fell flat to the ground. Miss Merivale had not enough acumen to detect anything personal in the innuendo; resuming her incisive smile she exclaimed quietly
"Oh, but some people you know, Miss Hampden, are always the same, they have only one set of manners, of course I don't mean to say that the Grants are any of these, indeed I never do say anything against anyone. Florrie, I believe, is a very nice little girl, in her set, of course I don't know much about her as I have never met her anywhere."
"Oh, no! None of our friends know her," Miss Holgate broke in with a relish.