Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/276

268 Miss Amy coloured in the dusk. 'It came, as I tell you, to-day.'

'Better late than never!' And Miss Susan got up.

Amy Frush sat looking. 'It's because you thought you had ground for jealousy that you've been extraordinary?'

Poor Susan, at this, quite bounced about. 'Jealousy?'

It was a tone—never heard from her before—that brought Amy Frush to her feet; so that for a minute, in the unlighted room where, in honour of the spring, there had been no fire and the evening chill had gathered, they stood as enemies. It lasted, fortunately, even long enough to give one of them time suddenly to find it horrible. 'But why should we quarrel now?' Amy broke out in a different voice.

Susan was not too alienated quickly enough to meet it. 'It is rather wretched.'

'Now when we're equal,' Amy went on.

'Yes—I suppose we are.' Then, however, as if just to attenuate the admission, Susan had her last lapse from grace. 'They say, you know, that when women do quarrel it's usually about a man.'

Amy recognised it, but also with a reserve. 'Well, then, let there first be one!'

'And don't you call him?'

'No!' Amy declared and turned away, while her companion showed her a vain wonder for what she could in that case have expected. Their identity of privilege was thus established, but it is not certain that the air with which she indicated that the subject had better drop didn't press down for an instant her side of the balance. She knew that she knew most about men.

The subject did drop for the time, it being agreed between them that neither should from that hour expect from the other any confession or report. They would treat all occurrences now as not worth mentioning—a course easy to pursue from the moment the suspicion of jealousy had, on each side, been