Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/352

 Eugenia sheered off on another tack, "And who is Madame Va … Va … something?"

"Madame Vallery? She's a … she's a sort of friend of mine. Yes, she's a friend. My old music-teacher, when I was a little girl, got us together. She's the wife of a Deputy, you know, like our Congressmen."

"Is she chic, too," asked Eugenia, "like Mrs. Marbury? Is she young? Is she pretty?"

Marise laughed, "No, she's not pretty or young. She must be fifty years old."

Eugenia was shocked. "And a friend of youah's!"

Marise explained, "She has more brains than you and I and forty other girls rolled into one. And I've met more interesting people at her house than …"

"Will you take me sometime—will you take me?" asked Eugenia.

"Yes, if you like," said Marise.

Eugenia looked around her wildly, as if to find some way of saying her thanks. Something in the street caught her eye. They were passing a florist's shop. She slammed the door open, curved her flexible little body around the frame, and caught at the driver's coat-tails. "Stop a minute!" she cried to him and dashed into the shop. When she came out she had a huge bunch of mauve-colored orchids in her arms.

"For you, for you," she cried, elated at her idea, thrusting them into Marise's hands, and kissing her again. And then, suddenly downcast, "Oh, it oughtn't to have been orchids! What? Roses? Lilies? Violets? … Yes, violets."

This time Marise protested energetically against this assumption of meanings in her face.

"I don't know what makes you say such things," she cried out helplessly, half-angrily. "Orchids are lovely—beautiful. How could anything be better? I never had any before in my life."

But the other was not to be comforted. "Yes, it ought to have been violets," she murmured, and then squaring her jaw, "And it will be violets, the next time. You just see!"