Ann Eliza remembered that it was Mr. Ramy’s evening.
When he came, the Teutonic eye for anything that blooms made him turn at once to the jonquils.
“Ain’t dey pretty?” he said. “Seems like as if de spring was really here.”
“Don’t it?” Evelina exclaimed, thrilled by the coincidence of their thought. “It’s just what I was saying to my sister.”
Ann Eliza got up suddenly and moved away; she remembered that she had not wound the clock the day before. Evelina was sitting at the table; the jonquils rose slenderly between herself and Mr. Ramy.
“Oh,” she murmured with vague eyes, “how I’d love to get away somewheres into the country this very minute–somewheres where it was green and quiet. Seems as if I couldn’t stand the city another day.” But Ann Eliza noticed that she was looking at Mr. Ramy, and not at the flowers.
“I guess we might go to Cendral Park some Sunday,” their visitor suggested. “Do you ever go there, Miss Evelina?”
“No, we don’t very often; leastways we ain’t been for a good while.” She sparkled at the prospect. “It would be lovely, wouldn’t it, Ann Eliza?”
“Why, yes,” said the elder sister, coming back to her seat.
“Well, why don’t we go next Sunday?” Mr. Ramy continued. “And we’ll invite Miss Mellins too–that’ll make a gosy little party.”
That night when Evelina undressed she took a jonquil from the vase and pressed it with a certain ostentation between the leaves of her prayer-book. Ann Eliza, covertly observing her, felt that Evelina was not sorry to be observed, and that her own acute consciousness of the act was somehow regarded as magnifying its significance.
The following Sunday broke blue and warm. The Bunner sisters were habitual church-goers, but for once they left their prayer- books on the what-not, and ten o’clock found them, gloved and bonneted, awaiting Miss Mellins’s knock. Miss Mellins presently appeared in a glitter of jet sequins and spangles, with a tale of having seen a strange man prowling under her windows till he was called off at dawn by a confederate’s whistle; and shortly afterward came Mr. Ramy, his hair brushed with more than usual care, his broad hands encased in gloves of olive-green kid.
The little party set out for the nearest street-car, and a flutter of mingled gratification and embarrassment stirred Ann Eliza’s bosom when it was found that Mr. Ramy intended to pay their fares. Nor did he fail to live up to this opening liberality; for after guiding them through the Mall and the Ramble he led the way to a rustic restaurant where, also at his expense, they fared idyllically on milk and lemon-pie.
After this they resumed their walk, strolling on with the slowness of unaccustomed holiday-makers from one path to another– through budding shrubberies, past grass-banks sprinkled with lilac crocuses, and under rocks on which the forsythia lay like sudden sunshine. Everything about her seemed new and miraculously lovely to Ann Eliza; but she kept her feelings to herself, leaving it to Evelina to exclaim at the hepaticas under the shady ledges, and to Miss Mellins, less interested in the vegetable than in the human world, to remark significantly on the probable history of the persons they met. All the alleys were thronged with promenaders and obstructed by perambulators; and Miss Mellins’s running commentary threw a glare of lurid possibilities over the placid family groups and their romping progeny.
Ann Eliza was in no mood for such interpretations of life; but, knowing that Miss Mellins had been invited for the sole purpose of keeping her company she continued to cling to the dress- maker’s side, letting Mr. Ramy lead the way with Evelina. Miss Mellins, stimulated by the excitement of the occasion, grew more and more discursive, and her ceaseless talk, and the kaleidoscopic whirl of the crowd, were unspeakably bewildering to Ann Eliza. Her feet, accustomed to the slippered ease of the shop, ached with the unfamiliar effort of walking, and her ears with the din of the dress-maker’s anecdotes; but every nerve in her was aware of Evelina’s enjoyment, and she was determined that no weariness of hers should curtail it. Yet even her heroism shrank from the significant glances which Miss Mellins presently began to cast at the couple in front of them: Ann Eliza could bear to connive at Evelina’s bliss, but not to acknowledge it to others.