"It's a
pity you weren't born fifty years ago. My friends would have liked
looking at you."
"I'm very glad I wasn't," said Scrap. "I dislike being looked
at."
"Absurd," said Mrs. Fisher, growing stern again. "That's what
you are made for, young women like you. For what else, pray? And I
assure you that if my friends had looked at you, you would have been
looked at by some very great people."
"I dislike very great people," said Scrap, frowning. There had
been an incident quite recently--really potentates. . .
"What I dislike," said Mrs. Fisher, now as cold as that stone she
had got up from, "is the pose of the modern young woman. It seems to
me pitiful, positively pitiful, in its silliness."
And, her stick crunching the pebbles, she walked away.
"That's all right," Scrap said to herself, dropping back into her
comfortable position with her head in the cushion and her feet on the
parapet; if only people would go away she didn't in the least mind why
they went.
"Don't you think darling Scrap is growing a little, just a
little, peculiar?" her mother had asked her father a short time before
that latest peculiarity of the flight to San Salvatore, uncomfortably
struck by the very odd things Scrap said and the way she had taken to
slinking out of reach whenever she could and avoiding everybody except
--such a sign of age--quite young men, almost boys.
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