Mrs. Pasmer stood at the drawing-room window of this apartment, the
morning after her call upon Mrs. Saintsbury, looking out on the passage
of an express-wagon load of trunks through Cavendish Square, and
commenting the fact with the tacit reflection that it was quite time
she should be getting away from Boston too, when her daughter, who was
looking out of the other window, started significantly back.
“What is it, Alice?”
“Nothing! Mr. Mavering, I think, and that friend of his----”
“Which friend? But where? Don't look! They will think we were watching
them. I can't see them at all. Which way were they going?” Mrs. Pasmer
dramatised a careless unconsciousness to the square, while vividly
betraying this anxiety to her daughter.
Alice walked away to the furthest part of the room. “They are coming
this way,” she said indifferently.
Before Mrs. Pasmer had time to prepare a conditional mood, adapted
either to their coming that way or going some other, she heard the
janitor below in colloquy with her maid in the kitchen, and then the
maid came in to ask if she should say the ladies were at home.
“Oh, certainly,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a caressing politeness that
anticipated the tone she meant to use with Mavering and his friend.
“Were you going, Alice? Better stay. It would be awkward sending out for
you. You look well enough.”
“Well!”
The young men came in, Mavering with his nervous laugh first, and
then Boardman with his twinkling black eyes, and his main-force
self-possession.
“We couldn't go away as far as New London without coming to see whether
you had really survived Class Day,” said the former, addressing his
solicitude to Mrs. Pasmer. “I tried to find out from, Mrs. Saintsbury,
but she was very noncommittal.” He laughed again, and shook hands with
Alice, whom he now included in his inquiry.
“I'm glad she was,” said Mrs. Pasmer--inwardly wondering what he meant
by going to New London--“if it sent you to ask in person.” She made them
sit down; and she made as little as possible of the young ceremony they
threw into the transaction. To be cosy, to be at ease instantly, was
Mrs. Pasmer's way. “We've not only survived, we've taken a new lease
of life from Class Day. I'd for gotten how charming it always was.
Or perhaps it didn't use to be so charming? I don't believe they have
anything like it in Europe. Is it always so brilliant?”
“I don't know,” said Mavering. “I really believe it was rather a nice
one.”
“Oh, we were both enraptured,” cried Mrs. Pasmer.