"I am," I retorted shamelessly. "I'm anxious for anything under the sun that will keep you talking to me. People might call that a flirtatious remark, but I plead not guilty; I wouldn't know how to flirt, even if I wanted to do so."
She turned her head and looked at me in a way that I could not misunderstand; it was plain, unvarnished scorn, and a ladylike anger, and a few other unpleasant things.
It made me think of a certain star in "The Taming of the Shrew."
"Fie, fie! unknit that threatening, unkind brow,
And dart not scornful glances from those eyes,
To wound thy neighbor and thine enemy,"
I declaimed, with rather a free adaptation to my own need.
Her brow positively refused to unknit. "Have you nothing to do but spout bad quotations from Shakespeare on a hilltop?" she wanted to know, in a particularly disagreeable tone.
"Plenty; I have yet to win that narrow pass," I said.
"Hardly to-day," she told me, with more than a shade of triumph. "Father is at home, and he heard of your trip yesterday."
If she expected to scare me by that! "Must our feud include your father? When I met him a month ago, he gave me a cordial invitation to stop, if I ever happened this way."
She lifted those heavy lashes, and her eyes plainly spoke unbelief.