“Me,—I go in for sepia,” confided Milly, gaining a bit of self-confidence and evincing the volubility of the provincial once started. “I’m doing my sitting room in browns and such. I got a print of St. Cecilia at Michalman’s. He lemme have it for seven dollars because the frame was scratched. But you never’d notice unless you looked close. And it was a fifteen-dollar picture!”
“How interesting!” murmured the other in slight distress.
“Oh, I know how to buy, once I have the money to buy with! I got a whole set of that funny furniture with the twisted legs to Blake Whipple’s for our dining room. Only fifty-nine dollars! It was marked a hundred and fifteen but Whipple lemme have it because he got stuck with it. Folks in our town ain’t much on stylish stuff. They want chairs that has good strong legs, made to be set on and not much else.”
“Undoubtedly!”
“Madam, dinner is served,” came a somewhat sonorous voice off toward the left. A butler in complete evening livery—a rare and an awesome sight for Milly whose only contact with butlers had been in the motion pictures—stood by the dining-room door. Instantly the hum of conversation ceased.
A rapier stab of fright pierced Milly’s vitals. Where was Nathan and would he wait for her? The wife abandoned the Cynthia person abruptly and frantically tried to pick her husband from the seven men all dressed alike. Horror of horrors!—Nathan was talking to that stout girl in silver-gray; she had a hand on his arm and they were moving toward the dining room.
Milly had a wild impulse to flee. She would have flown if she had dared search out the dressing-room alone. In her pitiful panic young Mosely approached her.
“May I take you in, Mrs. Forge?” he asked easily.
“I guess so,” the girl responded dazedly.
Mosely held out his arm but Milly did not essay to take it. The idea of such presumption! He should have taken her arm, of course. All the fellows had done it at the Saturday night dances in Foresters Hall before she was married. So in a cold sweat and flaming fright, somehow she moved toward the great double doors. Soft music started playing behind a bank of palms on the landing.