Allardyce caught the lily she swung toward him by the stem, and stuck it in his coat.
“I suppose that’s about the size of the Russian Giant’s button-hole flower,” he remarked frivolously. They were quite good friends now. Allardyce looked over at the college again.
“You must find it pretty slow up there,” he said confidentially. “Can’t imagine how you girls exist. You ought to go to a Paris boarding-school. You can have no end of fun there, you know.” He was nodding his head enthusiastically at her. “I have a cousin at one in the Avenue Marceau. Went to see her just before I sailed and it was tremendously amusing. These French girls are awful flirts! When I went away every girl in that school came to the windows and looked at me. It was rather trying, but I felt that for once I knew what popularity was!”
Miss Brent buried her face in the biggest lily of the bunch.
“And—and what did you do?” she inquired, in suppressed tones.
“Oh—I? Why I bowed and smiled at the whole lot. Must have looked rather like an idiot, now I come to think of it; and my cousin wrote me she got into no end of trouble about it. One of the maîtresses happened to see me. But it was great fun while it lasted. And after all where is the harm of a little flirting?” he concluded, judicially.
“Where indeed?” assented the girl, with a laugh.
“That’s right—I am glad to hear you say that,” broke in Allardyce, approvingly. “There’s something wrong with a woman who doesn’t cry or flirt—it’s a part of her nature,” he went on, with the air of having made a profoundly philosophic discovery. “You know you agree with me,” he urged, insinuatingly.
She shook her head.
“Personally I don’t know,” she said; “you see I am so busy——”