the day was hot and Joel took iced-tea, refusing whisky; the other youth took iced-tea too—she poured it for them in marvellous tall frail glasses filled with slivers of bright ice, and put in mint and lemon, doing all things deftly, beautifully, with her small, swift, china-lovely hands, and then turning to Joel’s guest, with her light cool smile, her crisp incisive inquiry, in which there was somehow something good and generous, she said:
“And won’t you have some whisky, too?” and as he hesitated, and looked dubious yet consenting, added: “In your iced-tea—if you like it that way?”
He looked at her, perplexed, and said uncertainly:
“I—don’t know…. Does it go that way?”
Miss Telfair bent back her head—her cheeks had the delicate colour of rose-tinted china, and she was pretty in the rose-tinted-china way—and laughed a thin, metallic, and yet musical and friendly laugh.
“Oh, yes!” she cried briskly and gaily, “it goes that way!… It goes very well that way.” More seriously, she added: “Yes, it’s really very good that way”—and crisply, yet encouragingly, with her fire-bright china-smile—“why don’t you try it?”
He looked at Joel dubiously, not certain what to do, and not wishing to embarrass his friend, and Joel looked back, with his radiant eager smile, shaking his head in droll refusal, whispering:
“Not for me. But go on if you like. Do as you like—”
“Well, then—” he said consentingly—and Miss Telfair, smiling lightly, took a bottle of Scotch whisky off the tray, uncorked it, and poured a drink into the tea—a good stiff shot it was, too—and when he had finished the drink, she poured him out another, adding another liberal potation of the Scotch.
Thus animated and released, he felt more at ease: they talked together quickly and easily; he had a good time. She was a bright, quick, cool, inquiring kind of woman, at once detached yet friendly, coolly amused yet curious: she asked him about his work at the university, the kind of classes that he taught and the kind of people that attended them, the kind of life he had in the city, and about the play that he was writing. The detached coolness of her curiosity was much like that of Mrs. Pierce, and suggested the curiosity of a woman of a separate and privileged world hearing about the creatures who lived in the great nameless world of dust and noise and strife and swelter “down below”—and yet it
