“No,” she continued, “I wasn’t thinking of you just then. I was simply telling you the kind of man I despise, you know. The man who thinks he is walking on a mountain-top when he is really on a very small hummock, and the mountains are hid by the clouds of his self-esteem.”
Ned thought Lisa was on a mountain-top herself at that moment, for she was talking over his head and he was looking at her with a dazed expression upon his rather stupid face. The sight of it so roused Lisa’s sense of humor that she began to laugh, and Ned smiled fatuously. The figure leaning against the pillar did not move until the reconnoitring party returned, and then, in the midst of the slight confusion their coming caused, he approached Lisa and said, “Will you take a little walk with me?”
The color rose to the girl’s face as, with an assenting motion, she made ready to go with him.
There was scarcely a word said until they reached the fallen tree; then Lisa, taking a seat upon one of the leafy boughs, said, lightly, “As this seems to be a silent session, I shall sit here until the spirit moves me.”
Mr. Danforth stood looking down at the graceful figure in the cloudy pink drapery framed by the green of the tree. “Miss Lisa,” he said, “somehow I have offended you.”
“Oh, no,” she replied, indifferently. “I don’t see why you should say that. We are simply casual acquaintances.”
“Then,” he said, with the shadow of a smile, “we will say that I do not impress you favorably. That is no fault of yours; but I think it would be more pleasant for us all if we could be more harmonious.”
Lisa was silent. She leaned over and pulled a little switch from the tree and began to tap the toe of her slipper with it.
“I have a confession to make to you,” Mr. Danforth went on. “I will tell you that I thought you a vain, frivolous girl, with little love for anything but excitement and admiration, until yesterday.” Lisa raised her eyes for a second, then began to pull the pointed leaves from the switch she held. “And then I saw that in my ignorance, in my warped, one-sided views of womankind, I had misjudged you, for I saw a girl whose tenderness for a little child made manifest her capacity for self-forgetfulness, and so I want to ask your pardon for my first opinion of you.”
“It was my fault,” responded Lisa, now completely disarmed. “I gave you reason to think as you did. I never knew a man before who—who cared—who didn’t care for pretty girls and preferred ugly ones.”