"Dick," she said, "how funny you are. I don't know much about Byron, but I kind of think you're trying to do the old melancholia act: Manfred or what d'you call 'em? You just stand there like old style opera, glowering; if you had a cloak you'd throw an end over your shoulder."
"Nan!" said he, and she was the more out of heart because the voice trembled with an honest supplication.
"There!" she hastened to put in, "that's it. You're 'choked with emotion.' Why do you want to sound as if you're speaking into a barrel? In another minute you'll be talking 'bitterly.'"
Dick was not particular about countering her gibes. That was unproductive. He had too much of his own to say.
"What do you suppose I'm here for?" he asked, as if, whatever it might be, it was in itself accusatory.
"Search me," said Nan, with the flippancy he hated.
She knew, by instinct as by long acquaintance, that one charm for him lay in her old-fashioned reticences and chiefly her ordered speech. Almost he would have liked her to be the girl Aunt Anne had tried to make her. That, she paused to note, in passing, was part of the general injustice of things. He could write free verse you couldn't read aloud without squirming (even in the company of the all-knowing young), but she was to lace herself into Victorian stays.
"I suppose," said she, "you came to see whether I mightn't be having the time of my life sitting here with Rookie by the fire."
"I did," he frankly owned. "Mother said you'd gone to New York. So she went on."
"Now what the dickens for? Haven't I a perfect right to go to New York without notice?"