“Well, I might try,” she said. “But I’m not at all good at hair——”
“Shave off my mustache if you like,” said the infatuated Archibald, with a grimace.
The ladies changed the subject decorously. It was plain that Archibald’s little advances toward an intimacy, to be derived from portrait-painting, were being met in rather an unencouraging spirit, don’t you know! The next day he invited them, as an agreeable diversion, to visit Coney Island; but Elvira made an excuse that she had no time for “pleasuring.” They seemed, indeed, to have few pleasures. The morning walk in Central Park was given up; Miss Perkins spent the greater part of the time when Elvira was at the Art School in riding to and fro, apparently, upon street-cars. One day she came home very late to dinner, saying that she had discovered the “Belt Line.” While waiting her return for dinner, Archibald had an agreeable tête-à-tête with Elvira.
IV.
He was growing more and more in love with this self-contained, charming, young New Englander. It had come to a time when he felt that he must speak. They had been at No. 41 now these four weeks, aunt and niece, and yet they had managed to preserve their distance. He was no nearer than the day they arrived.
He reflected that the pleasant little daily comedy which had amused him so entirely would have to be given up the instant he made known to her his state of feeling. But at the same time he felt he could act out the equivocation no longer. He must, as a gentleman, make a clean breast of his deception. Archibald had seen a great deal of women, and he believed that he understood them pretty well. He believed he understood Miss Price well enough to reckon upon the flattery of her sudden fascination that first day, for him, as the cause of his deceit. He planned to boldly tell her this, one day, while they were waiting for Miss Perkins to revolve around the “Belt Line.” But Elvira turned the conversation against his will. She seemed to have remarkable intuitions, this strange creature! Perhaps she had an intuition then. At any rate, she announced their determination to return to East Village the following Saturday.
“Father writes that his ague is no better—that I must come home,” she said. “There are, besides, the preserves——”
Archibald expressed no surprise. “If you go,” he said, “I think I’ll take a run up there also. I have the greatest curiosity about East Village.”
“There is nothing—it is dreadfully—I wouldn’t have you visit East Village for all the world!”
“Why?”