"_Have_ you?" muttered Jane. "I should think you had--a dozen times
over!"

"And what were you doing at _her_ house, may I ask?" her aunt queried
further. The geniality of this interrogation hardly concealed its
crudity; Jane felt herself accused of an incongruous and inexplicable
intrusion into a region of unaccustomed splendor and distinction.

"Oh, she was collecting money for her working-girls' lunchroom,"
volunteered Rosy, with a cruel bluntness.

Jane threw an air of outraged dignity upon her younger sister. "So I was.
And I spent a very pleasant hour with her," she said, with some
stateliness. "And I am going there next Wednesday to lunch," she added.

Her aunt looked at her with increasing consideration. She herself had
never been honored with an invitation to the house of Mrs. Granger
Bates--though rather than fail to respond to such an invitation she would
have crawled there (a trifle of some fourteen squares) on her hands and
knees. "Have you known her long?"

"Since ten this morning," contributed Rosy.

"Always," corrected Jane, with a whimsical brevity.

"And how do you find her?" persisted Mrs. Rhodes, with a curious
intentness. "Dear me!" she laughed, self-consciously, "how she did hate
to be beaten! How vexed she always was when I began throwing off first!
How she would bang her dice-box! How she would--"