hours. He's absolutely the only person I ever saw who really doesn't
care for--"
"Why, my _dear_!" interrupted Carlisle, smiling rather dangerously.
"You'll make me believe that you _admire_ the man immensely."
Hen laughed, and replied enigmatically: "Well, it's nice to feel free to
admire what's admirable, don't you think so?"
"You do admire him very much?"
"I think he's perfectly precious," said Henrietta Cooney.
A peal of triumph from the rear room indicated that Major Cooney had
reached the king-row in the teeth of bitter opposition. The peal came
from Looloo, who should have been reading "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme"
with a big dictionary instead of hanging over her father's shoulder.
Footsteps above suggested that Chas and Aunt Molly were making a careful
toilet indeed for his call upon the obscure inamorata.
In the Cooney parlor, the two girls looked at each other. Carlisle tried
hard to stare Hen down, and failed. In this moment she felt that she
positively disliked her commonly negligible cousin. She had proved and
re-proved to her own almost complete satisfaction that the man who had
spoken the affronting words to her in the summer-house was a virulent
religious fanatic, or (since she had read the piece) a crazy Socialist,
like the man who had thrown the brick at papa, or both; almost certainly
both. She was, it might be said, deeply and irrevocably committed to
these beliefs: they settled and explained everything, and no more need
to think or worry. It was simply not to be endured that Henrietta Cooney
should cheekily sit there and try to unsettle everything, pretending....
"But understand me, Cally," Henrietta was saying, with provoking calm.
"Of course I didn't like that letter a bit. You see--Heth wasn't any
more than a name to V.V., a sort of symbol, when he wrote it. But I
think it was a mistake all through, and I scolded him well at
the time--"
"Oh, did you?" said Cally, her cheeks very pink. "I imagined you thought
it perfectly precious of him to call papa a shameless homicide."
|