Page:An American Girl in India.djvu/23

 I half turned and looked down at him.

'Beetroot,' he said again, regarding me solemnly. 'Beetroot.'

I frowned at him under cover of the general conversation, not grasping in the least what he meant, but from long experience of him suspicious of something evil. 'Tomatoes?' He shook his head gravely. 'No, deeper than that.' He placed a finger first on one side of his face and then on the other, fixing me with his eyes. 'Beetroot,' he nodded meaningly, 'beetroot.' Then I saw what he meant, and if I had slain him straight away no jury of twelve honest British shopkeepers would have called it anything but justifiable homicide. Now, I admit that I do get hot at times. It's one of my great grievances. But I had always tried to delude myself into the belief that I only got a becoming colour, though secretly conscious all the time that rude people might have called it 'flushed.' But to be told straight out that you looked like beetroot! What woman could take calmly being told that her complexion was an awful colour like that? Of course it was only Tony. But, still, I knew that wretched little children of that age do somehow often manage to strike the truth. I was so dreadfully overcome that I took no notice of what people were saying until I suddenly heard Bob's voice with that particularly innocent, guileless note in it that I always knew meant mischief. He was smiling, too, in a nasty will-you-walk-into-my-parlour sort of way.