She turned on me quickly, as though about to break into an answering flash of anger. But on second thoughts she remained silent.
"If life were only as simple as you sentimental charity-workers try to make it!" she complained, studying me with a pitying look which I began most keenly to resent. She swept the room with a glance of contempt. "If all those hay-tossers who come to this town and have their money taken away from them were only as lamb-like as you people imagine they are!"
"Is this an effort toward the justification of theft?" I inquired. For the first time I saw a touch of deeper color mark her cheek. I had been conscious of a certain duality in her mental equipment, just as I could detect a higher and lower plane in her manner of speech.
"Not at all," she retorted. "I'm not talking of theft. And we may as well keep to cases. I don't think very much is ever gained by being impolite, do you?"
I was compelled to agree with her, though I could not shake off the feeling that she had in some dim way scored against me. And this was the woman I had once feared would try to toy with my coat-buttons.
"I'm afraid," she went on with her grave abstraction of tone, "that you'll find me very matter-of-fact. A woman can't see as much of the world as I have and then—oh! and then beat it back to the Elsie Books."
I resented the drop to the lower plane, as though she had concluded the upper one to be incomprehensible to me.
"Pardon me, madam; it's not my windmills I'm trying to be true to; it's one of my promises."
"The promise was a very foolish one," she mildly protested. "Yet for all that," she added, as an afterthought, "you're intelligent. And I like intelligence."
Still again her deep and searching eyes rested on my face. Her next words seemed more a soliloquy than a speech.