"And I suppose if she copped a millionaire in the ambush they wouldn't howl bloody murder," said the girl, with admirable intuition.
"Oh, well----" She yawned and looked out of the window. "She's probably having the time of her life. . . . I'm grateful she turned out such a little peach. . . . When she goes back and marries some fat spaghetti it will give her something to moon about to remember how she and Johnny Byrd used to sit out and strum to the stars---- There he is now."
"Bob?" said Mrs. Blair absently, her mind occupied by her young daughter's large sophistication.
She leaned half out the window as the red roadster shot thunderously across the rustic bridge and brought up sharply on the driveway below. With a shouted greeting she brought the driver's red-blonde head to attention.
Johnny grinned. "Trying to ride one horse and lead another. Sweet mount he's bringing you, Ruth. Didn't like the way I passed him. Bet you he throws you."
"You lose. . . . Where's the little Wop?"
"Gosh, is that all? Well, you scoot across to her room and tell Maria Angelina Santonini that she has a perfectly good date with me."
"She powdered her nose and went down stairs an hour ago," Ruth sang down, just as a small figure emerged from the music room upon the veranda and approached the rail.
"The little Wop is here, Signor," said Maria Angelina lightly.
Unabashed Johnny Byrd beamed at her. It was a perfectly good sensation, each time, to see her. One grew to suspect, between times, that anything so enchanting didn't really exist--and then, suddenly, there she was, like a conjurer's trick, every lovely young line of her.
Johnny knew girls. He knew them, he would have informed you, backwards and forwards. And he liked girls--devilish cunning games, with the same old trumps up their sleeves--when they wore 'em--but this girl was just puzzlingly different enough to evoke a curiously haunting wonder.
Was it the difference in environment? Or in herself? He couldn't quite make her out.
He seemed to be groping for some clew, some familiar sign that would resolve all the unfamiliarities to old acquaintance.
Meanwhile he continued to smile cheerily at the young person he had so rudely designated as a little Wop and gestured to the seat beside him.