“Because you what?”
“Because I vexed him. He was scolding me, and I wouldn't stand it.”
Her aunt tasted her tea, and found it so quite what she liked that she said, from a natural satisfaction with Bessie, “I don't see what he had to scold you about.”
“Well,” returned Bessie, and she got her pretty voice to the level of her aunt's hearing, with some straining, and kept it there, “when he is in that state, he has to scold some one; and I had been rather annoying, I suppose.”
“What had you been doing?” asked her aunt, making out her words more from the sight than from the sound, after all.
“I had been walking home with a jay, and we found Alan trying to get in at the front door with his key, and I introduced him to the jay.”
Miss Louisa Lynde had heard the word so often from her niece and nephew, that she imagined herself in full possession of its meaning. She asked: “Where had you met him?”
“I met him first,” said the girl, “at Willie Morland's tea, last week, and to-day I found him at Mrs. Bevidge's altruistic toot.”
“I didn't know,” said her aunt, after a momentary attention to her tea, “that jays were interested in that sort of thing.”
The girl laughed. “I believe they're not. It hasn't quite reached them, yet; and I don't think it will ever reach my jay. Mrs. Bevidge tried to work him into the cause, but he refused so promptly, and so-intelligently, don't you know—and so almost brutally, that poor Freddy Lancaster had to come and apologize to him for her want of tact.” Bessie enjoyed the fact, which she had colored a little, in another laugh, but she had apparently not possessed her aunt of the humor of it. She remained seriously-attentive, and the girl went on: “He was not the least abashed at having refused; he stayed till the last, and as we came out together and he was going my way, I let him walk home with me. He's a jay, but he isn't a common jay.” Bessie leaned forward and tried to implant some notion of Jeff's character and personality in her aunt's mind.