Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/30

 helped entertain others. Entertainment, in fact, was the one object of the establishment.

"Well, can't you entertain me yourself?"

"Perhaps I can." And it almost seemed as if he had been secured and isolated for the express purpose of undergoing a particular course of treatment.

"——in the interval," she amended. "They'll be

back by sunset. They're clever girls and I know you'll enjoy them."

She uttered this belief emphatically—so emphatically, in truth, that it came to mean: "I wonder if you will indeed." And there was even an overtone: "After all, it's not the least necessary that you should."

"I suppose I have met one of them already."

"You have met Amy. But there are Hortense and Carolyn."

"What can they all be.?" he wondered to himself: "daughters, nieces, cousins, co-eds, boarders ?" 'Amy plays. Hortense paints. Carolyn is a poet."

'Amy plays? Pardon me for calling her Amy, but you have never given me the rest of her name."

"I certainly presented you."

"To 'Amy'."

"Well, that was careless, if true. Her name is Amy Leffingwell; and Hortense's name is——"

"Stop, please. Pay it out gradually. My poor head can hold only what it can. Names without people to attach them to"

"The people will be here presently," Medora Phillips said, rather shortly. Surely this young man was taking his own tone. It was not quite the tone usually