“Let ’em,” retorted Mimi, and she was rewarded by his smile of thanks.
“Nope. You can’t afford it. But you’re the only person I know I could have talked to like this and who’d have understood. …”
Hilda sat beside her mother, silent for a long time. Seldom did her eyes leave Mimi and Carl. Though she could not hear what they were saying, she knew from the absorbed, eager way they were talking they had found some subject of deep mutual interest. To her their blissful ignoring of others was as excruciating as though red-hot irons were being applied to her own flesh. At first she furiously rejected the thought that Mimi was deliberately seeking to attract Carl. As the distant conversation continued she began to toy idly with the notion, turning it over and over in her mind, though it pained her, much as one will constantly probe a sore tooth with one’s tongue.
Then she hugged the belief closely to her, firm in the conviction Mimi was maliciously trying to take Carl—her, Hilda’s, Carl—away from her. She knew this wasn’t true, she hated herself for her distrust of her friend. But back she went each time to that same distrust which bordered dangerously near hatred. It was like meeting a person afflicted with some facial or bodily affliction, a harelip or a glass eye, determining not to notice the deformity, yet fascinatedly unable to keep one’s gaze from returning to the very thing one determined not to watch.
Hilda was all the more ashamed of her feeling toward Mimi because, so far as Carl knew, there was no reason why Hilda should have any claim upon him. There had never been any word of love between them, he had always been rather fond of her in an offhand way, had called her, as long as she could remember, “Little Sister.” She hated the term not alone