“Chicken, you're a little goose. The man is simply crazy about you, and harassed to death with this ranch business. Once that's settled--well, you'll see what sort of a lover he can be!”
“Thank you so much for holding out a little hope and encouragement, my dear!” Evadna, by the way, looked anything but thankful; indeed, she seemed to resent the hope and the encouragement as a bit of unwarranted impertinence. She glanced toward the door as if she meditated an immediate departure, but ended by settling back in the chair and beginning to rock again.
“It's a nasty, underhand business from start to finish,” said Miss Georgie, ignoring the remark. “It has upset everybody--me included, and I'm sure it isn't my affair. It's just one of those tricky cases that you know is rotten to the core, and yet you can't seem to get hold of anything definite. My dad had one or two experiences with old Baumberger--and if ever there was a sly old mole of a man, he's one.
“Did you ever take after a mole, chicken? They used to get in our garden at home. They burrow underneath the surface, you know, and one never sees them. You can tell by the ridge of loose earth that they're there, and if you think you've located Mr. Mole, and jab a stick down, why--he's somewhere else, nine times in ten. I used to call them Baumbergers, even then. Dad,” she finished reminiscently, “was always jabbing his law stick down where the earth seemed to move--but he never located old Baumberger, to my knowledge.”
She stopped, because Evadna, without a shadow of doubt, was looking bored. Miss Georgie regarded her with the frown she used when she was applying her mental measuring-stick. She began to suspect that Evadna was, after all, an extremely self-centered little person; she was sorry for the suspicion, and she was also conscious of a certain disappointment which was not altogether for herself.
“Ah, well”--she dismissed analysis and the whole subject with a laugh that was partly yawn--“away with dull care. Away with dull everything. It's too hot to think or feel. A real emotion is as superfluous and oppressive as a--a 'camel petticoat!” This time her laugh was real and infectiously carefree. “Take off your hat, chicken. I'll go beg a hunk of ice from my dear friend Peter, and make some lemonade as is lemonade; or claret punch, if you aren't a blue ribboner, or white-ribboner, or some other kind of a good-ribboner.” Miss Georgie hated herself for sliding into sheer flippancy, but she preferred that extreme to the other, and she could not hold her ground just then at the “happy medium.”