“Great Scott! Don’t say ‘my Miss Elton’!” Dick exclaimed. “Madeline doesn’t belong to me.” And he added politely, “Worse luck! She and I have always been like brother and sister. That’s all there is to it.”
“Are you sure?” demanded Ellery, with hot thrusts of mingled anguish and exultation stabbing through his bosom.
“Sure!” said Dick equably. “Why, even if I loved her, my dear fellow, I should know, from her unruffled serenity, that there was no hope for me. But Madeline isn’t a very emotional creature, Ellery. She has too much brains for that,—a girl to cheer but not inebriate.”
“I don’t want a girl to make me drunk,” ejaculated Norris.
“And though Miss Elton’s emotions do not lie on the surface, I’ll warrant they are there,” Ellery went on as though letting off pent-up steam. “They are like her voice—like all her motions—neither loud nor faint, but exquisitely modulated. She seems to me like the embodiment of innocence,—not the innocence of ignorance, but the untaintedness of a mind that goes through the world selecting the best, as the bee takes honey and leaves the rest. There’s no subject, so far as I can see, on which she is afraid to think; but I can not imagine that any subject would leave a deposit of mire in her mind.”
“Gee whizz!” scoffed Dick. “How fluent your year of journalism has made you! What a great thing it is to be a serious-minded young man with eye-glasses, engaged, while yet in youth, in molding public opinion through the mighty agent of the press! And Madeline is another of the same kind.”
“I wish I were of her kind,” said Ellery stiffly. “You may poke fun at me as much as you like, Dick, but it’s beneath you to jeer at her.”
“You old duffer, aren’t you two the best friends I have in the world? I like the clear and frosty mountain peaks.”
“How did you find out about Barry?” Ellery asked abruptly.