A bare-legged girl of ten came forward.
"And last but not least—are you, my darling?—Reggie, the baby."
He was a chubby youngster of six.
"So you see we're not a small family, nor a quiet one, either. How old are you, Nancy? You must be about the same age as the twins."
"I am seventeen," Nancy answered, finding it difficult to speak English before so many strangers.
"Seventeen! I should not have thought it. I suppose it's your costume which makes you seem younger. Why, you look almost like a boy. Then you are older than my girls." Mrs. Ferris did not know that Nancy was figuring her age by the Chinese reckoning, which makes a child one when it is born and two on the succeeding New Year's Day, so that a baby born on New Year's Eve can be two years old before he has lived two days.
Older though she might be, Nancy felt very young beside these two strapping lasses, who were so instantly friendly that she was no longer afraid to look at them. For twins their features were not much alike, but they had the same yellowish golden hair, which they allowed to fall profusely down their shoulders. Nancy had never seen this fashion before; it was strange, but she liked it. The color too was unusual, but not too freakish in Nancy's eyes, for she was used to her father's shock of light hair. The blue eyes did startle her, but the girl was more entertained by the dresses they were wearing, dainty white muslin which left throat and shoulders bare and spread out into many embroidered flounces at the knees. This was the foreign style, no doubt, but it did not appear quite modest.
Dinner offered formidable difficulties of its own. Nasmith secretly had prompted the family to talk and laugh in their usual manner so that their guests might not suffer too self-consciously from the ordeal. The hint was well taken, but Nancy and Edward could not wholly escape the interested surveillance of their neighbors. They were proud children, furtively careful how they dealt with knives and forks, not willing to disgrace the family name by even pardonable mistakes. But Edward fared better than his sister. He had been put at the right of Mrs. Ferris, with whom he was soon on easy terms in his eager boyish way, and he benefited by the little mannerly explanations of his hostess, words so delicately put that he did not know he was being instructed and enabled to relish the unfamiliar dishes.
The experiment of putting Nancy on Nasmith's right proved unfortunate. The girl could not accustom herself to sitting next to a man; it was too great a breach with the past. And even her hunger could not override the peculiar flavor of the food. She tried courageously to sip three spoonfuls of tomato soup; the taste balked her. She was more conservative than Edward. She held her knife stiffly and sawed ineffectually at the meat, just checking a potato from leaping with a shower of gravy on to the spotless cloth. With the Chinese aversion to uncooked greens, she rejected the salad, after one nibble; it made her ill to see the yellow oil which the others poured over their lettuce. But the crowning disaster came with the ice cream which the girl, unsuspecting its coldness, put into her mouth and then had no way to extract. The ice cream got behind her teeth, giving her for a moment almost unendurable agony. She lost the distinction between hot and cold, frightened by the thought that her mouth was burning. Almost on the verge of fainting, she could not hide her distress.
The impish Patricia giggled and an awkward titter of amusement went round the table as Nancy, having at last succeeded in swallowing the nauseous stuff, choked like a swimmer who has filled his mouth with salt water.