“Certainly,” I said coldly. That
was the way it was all along. Whenever there
was something to do that no one else would undertake—any
unpleasant responsibility—that entire mongrel
household turned with one gesture and pointed its finger
at me! Well, it is over now, and I ought not
to be bitter, considering everything.
It was quite characteristic of that memorable evening
(that is quite novelesque, I think) that my interview
with Jimmy should have a sensational ending.
He was terribly down, of course, and as I was trying
to pass him to get to the door, he caught my hand.
“You’re a girl in a thousand, Kit,”
he said forlornly. “If I were not so damnably,
hopelessly, idiotically in love with—somebody
else, I should be crazy about you.”
“Don’t be maudlin,” I retorted.
“Would you mind letting my hand go?” I
felt sure Bella could hear.
“Oh, come now, Kit,” he implored, “we’ve
always got along so well. It’s a shame
to let a thing like this make us bad friends.
Aren’t you ever going to forgive me?”
“Never,” I said promptly. “When
I once get away, I don’t want ever to see you
again. I was never so humiliated in my life.
I loathe you!”
Then I turned around, and, of course, there was Aunt
Selina with her eyes protruding until you could have
knocked them off with a stick, and beside her, very
red and uncomfortable, Mr. Harbison!
“Bella!” she said in a shocked voice,
“is that the way you speak to your husband!
It is high time I came here, I think, and took a hand
in this affair.”
“Oh, never mind, Aunt Selina,” Jim said,
with a sheepish grin. “Kit—Bella
is tired and nervous. This is a h—deuce
of a situation. No—er—servants,
and all that.”
But Aunt Selina did mind, and showed it. She
pulled the unlucky Harbison man through the door and
closed it, and then stood glaring at both of us.
“Every little quarrel is an apple knocked from
the tree of love,” she announced oratorically.
“This was a very little quarrel,” Jim
said, edging toward the door; “a—a
green apple, Aunt Selina, a colicky little green apple.”
But she was not to be diverted.
“Bella,” she said severely, “you
said you loathed him. You didn’t mean that.”
“But I do!” I cried hysterically.
“There isn’t any word to tell how I—how
I detest him.”
Then I swept past them all and flew to Bella’s
dressing room and locked myself in. Aunt Selina
knocked until she was tired, then gave up and went
to bed.
That was the night Anne Brown’s pearl collar
was stolen!
Of course, one knows that there are people who in
a different grade of society would be shoplifters
and pickpockets. When they are restrained by
obligation or environment they become a little overkeen
at bridge, or take the wrong sables, or stuff a gold-backed
brush into a muff at a reception. You remember
the ivory dressing set that Theodora Bucknell had,
fastened with fine gold chains? And the sensation
it caused at the Bucknell cotillion when Mrs. Van
Zire went sweeping to her carriage with two feet of
gold chain hanging from the front of her wrap?
