[96] “Gee ... it sounds devilish,” her guest grinned. Miss Ada had come back into the room, a little breathless and flushed from her brief promenade. “Well”—Miss Jennings consulted a diamond and platinum wrist watch—“Grammer’ll be dragging the lake, if any! On my way!” Glen surprised herself greatly, and delighted Miss Ada, by asking her to stay for supper. It was partly because the creature was patently friendly, but chiefly because it offered a respite before she must begin to think. There loomed before her a great mountain of doubt and distress and remorse to be tunneled through, and she shrank from beginning her toil. “I wish you would stay,” she heard herself urging. “Thanks a lot, but I can’t ditch The White Man’s Burden! Her national anthem is ‘I need thee every hour’ and especially at meal times; can’t digest her food unless she has me there to crab at. But listen,—why don’t you come and have dinner with us at the Bella Vista?” Then, as Glen did not reply—“I don’t blame you for not getting a kick out of it—music’s rotten and the food’s nothing to write home about. And every third guest playing hookey from the Pyramids. Say, when the doctors sent Grammer down here they said—‘Wonderful climate! Nobody[97] ever dies there!’ Well, it isn’t quite true; they die, but they don’t bury ’em; they park ’em at the Bella Vista. But if you can’t stick the B. V. D.—(that stands for the damn’ Bella Vista) why, there’s that Southern Home Cooking joint——” [97] “It isn’t that,” Glen interposed. “It isn’t that I don’t like the Bella Vista. I have never been there. It’s just——” Miss Jennings emitted a shrill little yelp of astonishment. “Never been there? Brought up here, and never been inside the town’s one and only Class G hotel? Page Cinderella! Well, that settles it. Go put on the soup and fish, sweet child of nature, and I’ll lead you forth into the wicked world. But I suppose,” she regarded her with good-humored shrewdness, “you haven’t any soup and fish?” Miss Ada Tenafee, who thought Miss Jennings was now proposing that they have the first two courses there, stated apologetically that they were merely having cold lamb and a salad that evening, and that she did wish dear Glen would accept Miss Jennings very kind invitation. “Right-o,” approved the guest. “You shush her along! Listen—I won’t dress, if you’d rather. I’ll go as is.”
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