Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/156

 IX

UT, Justine”

Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.

Mrs. Dressel’s intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had perhaps left the room to escape.

“When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother—and besides, you’d volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope Hospital. But now that you’ve come back for a rest and a change I can’t imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up—unless, of course,” she concluded, in a higher key of reproach, “it’s because you think so little of Hanaford society” [ 140 ]