“She’s on the top floor. Her contaminating influence, if she has one,
would have to percolate through another apartment before it got to me.”
She did not smile and I did not expect it. Mrs. Ferguson has no
sense of humor, and that’s one of the reasons I love her. There is
an obsession in the public mind just now about the sense of humor.
People ask anxiously if other people have it as Napoleon used to ask
if attractive ladies he had wooed in vain “were still virtuous.” It’s
like being a bromide-- Give me a bromide, a humorless, soft, cushiony
bromide, rather than those exhausting people who have established a
reputation for wit and are living up to it. Betty is not soft and
cushiony, but she is always herself.
“I wish you could live in a house of your own like a Christian,” she
said.
We have talked over this before. This subject has an embarrassing
side--I’ll explain it later--so I hastened to divert her.
“Why should you be wrought up over Miss Harris? I’m sure from what Mrs.
Bushey tells me she’s a very nice person,” and then I remembered and
added brightly: “She always pays her rent.”
Betty gave me a somber side glance.
“She’s very handsome.”
“There _are_ handsome people who are perfectly _convenable_. You’re
handsome, Betty.”
Betty was unmoved.
“At any rate you needn’t know her,” she said.
“Don’t you think I ought to say ‘Howd’ye do’ if I meet her on the
stairs?”
“No, why should you? The next thing would be she’d be coming into your
rooms and then, some day, she’d come when somebody you liked was there.”
She clasped her hands in her lap and drew herself up, her head so erect
the double chin she fears was visible. In this attitude she kept a cold
eye on me.
“And all because she’s handsome and wears a hat as big as a tea tray,”
I said, trying to treat the subject lightly, but inwardly conscious of
a perverse desire to champion Miss Harris.
Betty, wreathing her neck about in the tight grip of her collar,
removed her glance to the window, out of which she stared haughtily
as though Miss Harris was standing on the tin roof supplicating an
entrance.
“We can’t be too careful in this town,” she murmured, shaking her head
as if refusing Miss Harris’ hopes. Then she looked down at the floor. I
saw her expression changing as her eye ranged over the rug.
“Where did you get this rug, Evie?” she asked in a quiet tone.