Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/97

 "This was after dinner, on the terrace. For a long while Rhoda just made smoke go quietly out into the air. Then she said about the last thing on earth you would have expected her to say. 'I thought about you a lot while I was away. And I'm sure you'd be making a mistake not to go. Everybody has to find out what it's all about, in his own way. All I wish is that I had as much to look forward to as you have.'

"That from Rhoda, who has always treated my drawings as pretty things which I'd grow up and stop doing! Had she only been teasing me; or did she detect a new strength in me; or was she getting tired of having me around?

"Somehow her calm acquiescence gave my conceit a punch in the wind. And I was even more chastened to find her entering so completely into the spirit of my pilgrimage that she helped me pack, helped me add up my accounts, and actually drove me down to Boston, bag and baggage, in her own car, without a whimper. I kept wondering whether I had got on her nerves, whether the episode in the garden had made her dislike me. That thought was a new thing under the sun, and not a very cheerful one. I kept wondering how well the Pearns knew their neighbors the Peperells, and if Rhoda was perhaps beginning to take Pep seriously. Why shouldn't she, for that matter: there's absolutely no reason—no reasonable reason. On the contrary. But if so, why not be frank about it? If I can think of Rhoda as a sister, I ought to be