Page 35 of If Looks Could Kill
“Percival,”she said.
“Fine.” With great effort, I didn’t roll my eyes to the ceiling. “WhenPercivalLaurier tells you how your golden hair is like an angel’s or your blue eyes are like the sea—”
“Have you beeneavesdroppingon us?” Her breath came hard and fast.
“No!” I cried. “As if I—I would never!”
“Thenhow do you know what he’s said?”
If this moment weren’t so horrible, it would be funny.
“Because men are dumb, unimaginative bricks,” I cried. “Because they trot out the same tired lines again and again. I was only guessing what he likely said.”
“They’re not ‘tired lines,’?” she said. “And Mr. Laurier isn’t a dumb brick. He’s a brilliant young man.”
Because he’s made sure to tell you he is, twenty times over. I sighed. Stop it, Tabitha. “Then tell him to compare you to something else.”
“Is it fun, Tabitha?” she demanded. “To go through the world, sneering at everybody?”
“I don’t—”
“Why can’t you just let people alone? Let them enjoy their own happiness without stomping all over it with the cynical, superior wit of the Great Tabitha Woodward?”
The Great—!“I’m no ‘superior wit,’?” I cried. “Is that what you think I think?”
“It’s what I know you think.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t know how we ended up here. This is what I wastrying to say. When Percival Laurier tells you how beautiful you are”—I spoke carefully—“he’s not working hard to find something positive to say. He’s saying what he feels. He isovercomewith the feeling of your stunning beauty. That’s how men talk to you. It’s not how they talk to me.”
She bit her lip. She seemed to be struggling to compose herself.
“And that’s fine,” I went on. “They don’t need to feel that way about me. Only sometimes, you know, a tiny little part of me wishes that—”
Pearl cut me off. “You don’t know how men talk to me,” she said. “You don’t know the kinds of comments I’ve had to endure.” She caught herself. “Unless you’ve had to endure them also. Perhaps, as you say, men really are all the same.”
And there she went again. Possibly, even such a one asImight have had to endure them, if men really were such toads; she’d (obviously) endured them becauseshe was pretty.
Yet, in all my fixation upon how men admired her, I’d brushed aside the other types of comments routinely thrown her way. I’d viewed them as if they were compliments she’d be pleased to receive, when, in fact, most were crude and horrible.
“You’re right,” I told her. “I don’t know most of the things men have said to you.”
Her expression, as she watched my face, was unreadable.
“I’ve only just met you,” I went on. “I don’t know what you faced before you came here.”
Pearl sat down heavily upon her bed. She seemed tired.
“Are you jealous?” she asked me at length. “Of Mr. Laurier’s attentions?”
I tried not to smile. “I’m not,” I told her. “Truly, I’m not.”
She didn’t believe me. Fine; let her believe her Prince Charming was every girl’s dream.
A distant clamor of bells told us it was five o’clock. The sky was nearly dark.
Pearl sighed. I felt weary and spent after our quarrel, and she likely felt the same.
“What do you say?” I asked her. “Do we have time to look for our window girl?”
