After we got back from our walk and were settled at dinner, Viola, with a circumspect look at Leslie, said something about Mr. Wake’s books, and I saw Leslie look up at her suddenly and piercingly. And before I went to bed she called me over to her room. She had on a layer of mud--it was some kind of Russian stuff that she put on to cleanse the pores--and it made her look like a mummy. I _had_ to giggle. “What is the cause of your mirth?” she asked coldly as she stopped brushing her hair. “Well,” I answered, “you look kind of funny.” She elevated her chin, and I think she gave me that cool stare with which she even occasionally subdues Miss Meek, but of course it couldn’t get through her mud-pie finish. “I want to know,” she said after a second of comparative silence, during which she had slammed her little jars around on her bureau, and brushed her hair so hard that I thought she’d brush it all out, “whether it is true that Mr. Wake is a writer?” “Why, yes,” I answered, “‘Beautiful Tuscany,’ ‘Hill Roads,’ ‘Old Roman Byways’ and lots more were written by him.” It seemed to irritate her. “It would _seem_ to me,” she confided, “that you would naturally _mention_ it!” I didn’t see why, but I didn’t say so. I just picked up a button hook and wiggled it around in my hands, the way you do when you have nothing to do but feel uncomfortable. “You lack finish, and are as gauche as any one I _ever_ knew,” she went on. I didn’t know just what she meant by that, but I knew I didn’t like it. “Don’t you know that when you introduce people,” she questioned, “you should give some idea of the--the standing of each person so that--that they may know whom they shall be _nice_ to?” I shook my head. “Well, you _do_,” she snapped, “and if you have any more people to present to me, I want to _know_ about them. . . . I positively snapped at this Mr. Wake--I am fearfully humiliated over it!--and just a _word_ from you would have saved me.” (She slammed a bureau drawer shut until everything on the bureau top rattled), “I didn’t imagine he _could_ be anybody, because Viola Harris-Clarke raved so--” “He was my friend in any case,” I said, because I was getting mad, “and if you’d remembered that and been kind, you’d have spared both of us. I was ashamed of you--Mr. Wake was being kind to us, and you were rude to him without any reason for being so.” “_You_ ashamed of me?” she echoed, and wheeled on me, to stand looking at me in a dreadful way. “Yes,” I said, “I _was_,” and I said it hard. She drew a deep breath, and was about to start in when I decided I would go. I only heard her say, “You come from the backwoods of Pennsylvania, and so you cannot understand the--_the infamy of your statement_, but in New York _I_--my _family_--”