“Ella?”
“Yes. She's right here. Hold the wire, will you?” She turned away from the telephone to face Ella. “It's Mr. Fenger. He wants to take us both driving this afternoon. You can go, can't you?”
“I certainly CAN,” replied Miss Monahan, with what might have appeared to be undue force.
Fanny turned back to the telephone. “Yes, thanks. We can both go. We'll be ready at four.”
Fanny decided that Fenger's muttered reply couldn't have been what she thought it was.
Ella busied herself with the unpacking of a bag. She showed a disposition to spoil Fanny. “You haven't asked after your friend, Mr. Heyl. My land! If I had a friend like that—” “Oh, yes,” said Fanny, vaguely. “I suppose you and he are great chums by this time. He's a nice boy.”
“You don't suppose anything of the kind,” Ella retorted, crisply. “That boy, as you call him—and it isn't always the man with the biggest fists that's got the most fight in him—is about as far above me as—as—” she sat down on the floor, ponderously, beside the open bag, and gesticulated with a hairbrush, at loss for a simile “as an eagle is above a waddling old duck. No, I don't mean that, either, because I never did think much of the eagle, morally. But you get me. Not that he knows it, or shows it. Heyl, I mean. Lord, no! But he's got something—something kind of spiritual in him that makes you that way, too. He doesn't say much, either. That's the funny part of it. I do all the talking, seems, when I'm with him. But I find myself saying things I didn't know I knew. He makes you think about things you're afraid to face by yourself. Big things. Things inside of you.” She fell silent a moment, sitting cross-legged before the bag. Then she got up, snapped the bag shut, and bore it across the room to a corner. “You know he's gone, I s'pose.”
“Gone?”
“To those mountains, or wherever it is he gets that look in his eyes from. That's my notion of a job. They let him go for the whole summer, roaming around being a naturalist, just so's he'll come back in the winter.”
“And the column?” Fanny asked. “Do they let that go, too?”