She came in presently with Daisy Hammerton. The latter gave her hand frankly to her childhood's comrade; the former said:
"Hah! James Desboro!" very disagreeably, and started to nourish herself at once with tea and muffins.
"James Desboro," she repeated scornfully, darting a wicked glance at him where he stood smiling at her, "James Desboro, turning plow-boy in Westchester! What's the real motive? That's what interests me. I'm a bad old woman--I know it! All over paint and powder, and with too small a foot and too trim a figger to be anything except wicked. Lindley knows it; it makes his fingers tremble when he pinches crysanthemums; Susan knows it; so does Daisy. And I admit it. And that's why I'm suspicious of you, James; I'm so wicked myself. Come, now; why play the honest yokel? Eh? You good-looking good-for-nothing!"
"My motive," he said amiably, "is to make a living and learn what it feels like."
"Hah! And now you've got to raise the wind, somehow?"
He repeated, good-humouredly: "I want to make a living."
The trim little old lady darted another glance at him.
"Ha--ha!" she laughed, without giving any reason for the disagreeable burst of mirth; and started in on another muffin.
"I think," said Mr. Hammerton, vaguely, "that James will make an excellent agriculturist----"
"Excellent fiddlesticks!" observed Aunt Hannah. "He'd make a good three-card man."
"I know she does, immensely. She makes me take her for an hour's walk every day--and I'm so tired of exercising her and listening to her--unconventional stories--about you."
"She's a bad old thing," said Desboro affectionately, and, in his natural voice: "Aren't you, Aunt Hannah? But there isn't a smarter foot, or a prettier hand, or a trimmer waist in all Gotham, is there?"
"Philanderer!" she retorted, in a high-pitched voice. "What about that Van Alstyne supper at the Santa Regina?"
"Which one?" he asked coolly. "Stuyve is always giving 'em."
"Read the _Tattler_!" said the old lady, seizing more muffins.
Mrs. Hammerton closed her tight lips and glanced uneasily at her daughter. Daisy sipped her tea demurely. She had read all about it, and burned the paper in her bedroom grate.
Desboro gracefully ignored the subject; the old lady laughed shrilly once or twice, and the conversation drifted toward the more decorous themes of pinching back roses and mixing plant-food, and preparing nourishment for various precocious horticultural prodigies now developing in Lindley Hammerton's hothouses.