“Very much,” Susan said, a little shyly.

“Get down, Jerry,” Miss Saunders said, giving her companion a little shove with her elbow.

“Look here, who you pushing?” demanded the gray-haired young man, without venom.

“I’m pushing you.”

“‘It’s habit.  I keep right on loving her!’” quoted Mr. Phillips to the bystanders.  But he got lazily down, and Susan got up, and they were presently spinning away into the quiet of the lovely, warm summer afternoon.

Miss Saunders talked rapidly, constantly, and well.  Susan was amused and interested, and took pains to show it.  In great harmony they spent perhaps an hour in driving, and were homeward bound when they encountered two loaded buckboards, the first of which was driven by Peter Coleman.

Miss Saunders stopped the second, to question her sister, who, held on the laps of a girl and young man on the front seat, was evidently in wild spirits.

“We’re only going up to Cameroncourt!” Miss Emily shouted cheerfully.  “Keep Miss Brown to dinner!  Miss Brown, I’ll never speak to you again if you don’t stay!” And Susan heard a jovial echo of “Can a nice girl do that?” as they drove away.

“A noisy, rotten crowd,” said Miss Saunders.  “Mamma hates Emily to go with them, and what my cousins—­the Bridges and the Eastenbys of Maryland are our cousins, I’ve just been visiting them—­would say to a crowd like that I hate to think!  That’s why I wanted Emily to come out in Washington.  You know we really have no connections here, and no old friends.  My uncle, General Botheby Hargrove, has a widowed daughter living with him in Baltimore, Mrs. Stephen Kay, she is now,—­well, I suppose she’s really in the most exclusive little set you could find anywhere—­”

Susan listened interestedly.  But when they were home again, and Ella was dressing for some dinner party, she very firmly declined the old lady’s eager invitation to remain.  She was a little more touched by Emily’s rudeness than she would admit, a little afraid to trust herself any further to so uncertain a hostess.

She went soberly home, in the summer twilight, soothed in spite of herself by the beauty of the quiet bay, and pondering deeply.  Had she deserved this slight in any way? she wondered.  Should she have come away directly after luncheon?  No, for they had asked her, with great warmth, for dinner!  Was it something that she should, in all dignity, resent?  Should Peter be treated a little coolly; Emily’s next overture declined?

She decided against any display of resentment.  It was only the strange way of these people, no claim of courtesy was strong enough to offset the counter-claim of any random desire.  They were too used to taking what they wanted, to forgetting what it was not entirely convenient to remember.  They would think it absurd, even delightfully amusing in her, to show the least feeling.

Arriving late, she gave her cousins a glowing account of the day, and laughed with Georgie over the account of a call from Loretta’s Doctor O’Connor.  “Loretta’s beau having the nerve to call on me!” Georgie said, with great amusement.