“You’ve nothing of the sort!” denied her sister indignantly.
“I have. You don’t know anything about it, it’s—it’s just developing. I get all hot inside; sometimes it breaks out the way it did at Miss Ware’s and to-day it made me nasty and sarcastic. I’ve always hated sarcastic people!”
“What has Mr. Landor done, dear, to make you dislike him so? I thought he seemed most charming and agreeable.”
“Did you?” indifferently, leaning back in her chair. Suddenly she sat bolt upright and exclaimed vehemently, “Julie Dale, if you dare to take to singing his praises as Dr. Ware does I’ll—I’ll—well, I don’t know what I’ll do! I hate him, with his smiling, masterful air and his prying into affairs which are none of his business.” (This seemed rather strong language, but Julie did not interrupt her.) “He is an idle society man and we are hard-working girls. He has nothing in common with us whatever. We’ve no use for men, anyway—they don’t belong to the sort of life we live, they—they don’t fit into our scheme of things. Rather neat, that last phrase, eh, Julie? Read it in a book.” As usual, Hester’s outburst ended in a laugh.
“Are you twenty years old,” said Julie stooping down to kiss the flushed face, “or two hundred, Hester?”
“I’m an end-of-the-century idiot, that’s what I am!” she replied, pulling Julie over to give her a suffocating hug. Then in that irrelevant fashion so characteristic of her she threw back her head and sniffed the air suspiciously.
Hester chased her into the little dining-room. “Julie Dale! do I smell steak?” Hester’s nostrils fairly quivered.
“You do. I plunged into that wild extravagance on the strength of the mayonnaise, and I don’t care what you say!”
“Say!” gasped Hester as Bridget brought in this unheard of luxury, “I only want to eat!”
“To have driven your little friends away. They evidently had some good news to tell you.”
“Oh! that’s all right,” said Jack cheerily, “it will keep, you know, and they were in a hurry—they said they could only stop a moment.” Jack was puzzling his young brain over their abrupt departure, but his loyalty to all three friends made him wish to hide from Landor the fact that he was apparently the cause. “I’m so sorry they _were_ in a hurry,” he continued, “for I’m always wishing you knew one another—you’d get on like a house afire.”