Mrs.Dresser had grown restive; and her nods and vague responses to her young dependent's gaieties were as meager as they could well be.

Evidently the matron had no intention of appearing to her world in the light of a chaperone for Alice Adams; and she finally made this clear.

With a word or two of excuse, breaking into something Alice was saying, she rose and went to sit next to Mildred's mother, who had become the nucleus of the cluster.
So Alice was left very much against the wall, with short stretches of vacant chairs on each side of her.

She had come to the end of her picture-making, and could only pretend that there was something amusing the matter with the arm of her chair.
She supposed that Mildred's Mr.Russell had forgotten Walter by this time.

"I'm not even an intimate enough friend of Mildred's for him to have thought he ought to bother to tell me he couldn't find him," she thought.