She regaled us with a symphony of sighs which, though she was uninvited and free to leave anytime she chose to, was her way of letting us all know how utterly bored she was with our company and our conversations.
We did our best to ignore her.
She redoubled her efforts to bend the room to her will by adding flourishes of deep hacking coughs and sneezes like banshee wailing.
“Bless you,” we said, each in our turn, before turning back to pick up the threads of conversations.
Undaunted she continued her campaign to draw the spotlights in the room…all of the spotlights in the room…to her. The theatrics of practiced sighs and stage-whisper coughs and throat-clearings rising until a crescendo until, at last, we surrender.
“So what’s going on with you?” Someone asked her.
She cleared her throat…demurely this time…and smiled ever so slightly. She gazed…contentedly, a little contemptuously…at her audience and nodded with satisfaction. “Well, as a matter of fact…” she began.
She happily held court for the better part of the next two hours.
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