Couldn't you induce one of them--any one at all, of
course--to bring you, if he knew there was a place waiting for you both?"
"The gentleman who is going to escort me," began Jane, rising suddenly to
a very formal tone, "is--well, in fact, he--he doesn't go out very much,"
she proceeded, lapsing back into her former manner. "He's kind of quiet
and retiring. I don't believe he'd ever go to anything like this."
"Not when he's got a good place offered him--and a nice girl to take,
with a brand-new dress of just the right sort to go in? I should want a
beau of mine to have a little more spunk than that."
"How can you talk that way?" whimpered Jane, quite quivering with
pleasure. "I can't sit here and listen to anything like that. What
right"--with a feint of maiden indignation--"what right have you to say
that Mr. Br--that anybody is--is my--"
"Beau," supplied Mrs. Bates, serenely. "Beau--that's what I said.
Old-fashioned word, I know; but I can't think of a better one."
"You're just dreadful; you are," stammered Jane, trying to withdraw as
best she might from too pronounced an attitude of protest. She fingered
the length of ravelled bordering that drooped from the hair-cloth cushion
of her chair and ran an eye, pretendedly speculative, up and down the
pink and green stripes of Mrs. Bates's wall-paper.
"I'm pretty sure he wouldn't go--the gentleman who is to escort me to the
lecture," she said, with another return to her vain paraphrase.
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