“Well, it’s kind of you to see ineffectuality in that light.” Still examining the steeplechaser quality, he added, “You do care, don’t you, a lot?”
“Yes, a lot. I am worldly to my finger-tips.” Her eyes challenged him—gaily, not defiantly—to misunderstand her again.
“What do you mean, exactly, by worldly?” he asked.
“I mean by it that I believe in the world, that I love the world; I believe that its grapes are worth while,—and by grapes I mean the things that people strive for and that the strong attain. The higher they hang and the harder the climb, the more I like them.”
Gavan received these interpretations without comment. “A seat in the House isn’t very high, though, is it?” he remarked.
“That depends on the sitter. It might be a splendid or a trivial thing.”
“And in my case, if I’d got it, what would it have been? Can you see that, too, you very clear-sighted young woman?”
He stood above her, smiling, but now without suavity or artificiality; looking at her as though she were a pretty gipsy whose palm he had crossed with silver. And Eppie answered, quite like a good-natured gipsy, conscious of an admiring but skeptical questioner, “I think it would have been neither.”
“But what then? What would this sitter have made of it?”
“A distraction? An experiment upon himself? I’m sure I don’t know. Indeed, I don’t pretend to know you at all yet. Perhaps I will in time.”