“And do you know the kind of thing she’d consider perfect?”
It was so stupid a question that I couldn’t be surprised to see a gleam of quiet mischief in her glance as she replied, “From little hints she’s dropped to me, quite confidentially, I rather think I do.”
Fair men blush easily, but I tried to ignore the fact that I was doing it as I said, “That’s quite a common delusion at one stage of the game; but suppose she were to find that she was mistaken?”
The answer shelved the question, though she did it disconcertingly: “Oh, well, in the case she’s thinking of I don’t believe she will.”
I was so eager for data that I pushed the inquiry indiscreetly.
“What makes you so sure?”
“One can tell. It isn’t a thing one can put into words. You know by a kind of intuition.”
“Know what?”
“That a certain kind of person can never have had any but a certain kind of standard.” She gave me another of those quietly mischievous glances. “I’ll tell you what she said to me one day not long ago. She said she’d only known one man in her life—known him well, that is—of whom she was sure that he was a thoroughbred to the core.”
“But you admitted at the beginning that that kind of conviction is a danger.”