Chapter 16
Daydream Believer
“Ihave met your Miss Evans for tea,” Olive said on Sunday, sweeping into the drawing room Effie was sitting in pretending to read.
“She’s notmyMiss Evans, and why did you not invite me?” Effie put down his prop book and smiled. He hadn’t been able to read because he couldn’t stop thinking about Julianna. He wanted to see her again, but if he couldn’t do that—he had yet to come up with another excuse to visit her office—a secondhand account of time spent with her would be a compensatory way to pass an afternoon.
“I wanted to get the measure of her,” Olive said.
“I’ve already told you the measure of her.” But he would gladly tell her again.
“I know, but you’ll forgive me for saying I wasn’t certain I could trust you to be objective.”
“How do you mean?”
“I say this with great affection, my dear friend, but you have been known to attach yourself to notions that are more fanciful than practical.” As he began to object, she glanced pointedly down at his shoes—he was wearing the red heels.
Effie could not help but smile. “And? Did you find Miss Evans up to snuff?”
Olive’s eyes danced. “I did indeed.”
He would have been relieved except he knew there could have been no other outcome. “Perhaps I am overly vulnerable to fanciful ideas, or fashions”—he kicked up one of the red heels—“but my taste in people is beyond reproach. Shall I call for tea?”
“Yes, please.”
Olive poured the tea when it came, and Effie sipped happily, once again relishing the prospect of talking about Julianna. He had spent agesnottalking about her,years, and from this vantage point, he couldn’t think why. “Isn’t Miss Evans so intelligent?”
“She is, very.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Oh, all kinds of things. I couldn’t even begin to recount them. I think we have, in a short time, become genuine friends. Though I admit to being a trifle intimidated; she really is so very knowledgeable about so many things.”
“Yet her erudite nature coexists so delightfully, so apparently congruously, with a flash of a whimsical disposition.”
“I wonder if her whimsical disposition is reserved for you, for I did not witness it.”
“Oh, do you think so?”
Olive set down her teacup. “Effie, have you told Miss Evans that you’re in love with her?”
Effie set down his. “I have.”
Or at least his macaw had.
The message had been delivered, was the point.
Olive clearly had not expected that answer, for she opened and closed her mouth a few times without any words coming out. Her interlude of muteness was followed by a great peal of laughter.
Effie laughed. Her mirth was contagious, even if he had yet to discover the source of it.
“I thought I was coming here to read you a stern lecture on the topic,” she said when she’d recovered.
“Did you? Well, let’s have it. I wouldn’t want a stern lecture to go to waste.”
“Oh, I can’t deliver such a lecture now. We shall have to move on to plotting.”
“Plotting?”
