"Will you have one?" he asked.
She shook her head. He lighted the cigarette; the smoke seemed to restore his self-possession.
"I've been too busy to meet girls," he declared.
Clancy shrugged.
"You weren't busy night before last."
She was enjoying herself hugely. The night before last, when she had met men at Zenda's party at the Château de la Reine, and, later, at Zenda's home, she had been too awed by New York, too overcome by the reputations of the people that she had met to think of any of the men as men. But now she was talking to a young man whose eyes, almost from the moment that she had accosted him on Park Avenue, had shown a definite interest in her. Not the interest of any normal man in a pretty girl, but a personal interest, and interest in her, Clancy Deane, not merely in the face or figure of Clancy Deane.
Randall was the sort of man, Clancy felt (still without knowing that she felt it), in whom one could repose confidences without fear of betrayal or, what is worse, misunderstanding. All of which unconscious, or subconscious, analysis on Clancy's part accounted for her own feeling of superiority toward him. For she had that feeling. A friendly enough feeling, but one that inclined her toward poking fun at him.
"No," admitted Randall; "I was kind of lonesome, and—I saw you, and——"
Clancy took the wheel and steered the bark of conversation deftly away from herself.
"Mrs. Carey must know many girls," she said. "And she seemed quite an intimate friend of yours." Clancy had in her make-up the due proportion of cattishness.