So on the morning after her initiation into the intricacies of Americanization, she beamed upon him with almost sisterly affection.
"Good morning, Angelo. Isn't this a wonderful day? Whose secrets have you ferreted out in the night while I was asleep?"
Angelo flushed with pleasure, and shoved some earlier passengers back into the car to make room for her beside him.
"I thought you'd be too sick to come this morning," he said, with his wide smile that displayed two rows of white and even teeth. "I thought it would take you twenty-four hours to get over us."
"Oh, not a bit of it," she laughed. "And I am equally glad to see that you are recovering from your attack of me."
This while the elevator rose, stopping at each floor to discharge passengers.
At the fifth floor Eveley passed out with a final smile and a light friendly touch of her hand on Angelo's arm.
This was the beginning of their strange friendship, which ripened rapidly. Her memory of that night in the Service League with the Irish-American Club was very hazy and dim. Except for the tangible presence and person of Angelo, she might easily have believed it was all a dream.
In spite of her deep conviction that she was not destined to any slight degree of success as an Americanizer, Eveley conscientiously studied books and magazines and attended lectures on the subject, only to experience deep grief as she realized that every additional book, and article, and lecture, only added to her disbelief in her powers of assimilation.
So deep and absolute was her absorption, that for some days she denied herself to her friends, and remained wrapped in principles of Americanization, which naturally caused them no pleasure. And when a morning came and she called a hasty meeting of her four closest comrades, voicing imperative needs and fervent appeals for help, she readily secured four promises of attendance in the Cloude Cote that evening at exactly seven-thirty.
At seven-forty-five Eveley sat on the floor beside the window impatiently tapping with the absurd tip of an absurd little slipper. Nolan had not come.
Kitty Lampton was there, balancing herself dangerously with two cushions on the arm of a big rocker. Eveley called Kitty the one drone in her circle of friendship, for Kitty was born to golden spoons and lived a life of comfort and ease and freedom from responsibility in a great home with a doting father, and two attentive maids. Eileen Trevis was there, too, having arrived promptly on the stroke of seven-thirty. Eileen Trevis always arrived promptly on the stroke of the moment she was expected. She was known about town as a successful business woman, though still in the early thirties. The third of the group was Miriam Landis, whose inexcusable marriage to her handsome husband had seriously deranged the morale of the little quartet of comrades.