"He respects a lot of other fellows too."
A little "H'm!" through pursed-up lips was a sign of dissent. "I wonder. He goes with them, I know, and rather envies them, which is what I mean by his standards not being very high; but—"
"Oh, Guy's all right. The fellows you speak of are sometimes a little fresh; but he knows where to draw the line. He'll go to a certain point; but you won't get him beyond it."
"And he owes that to you."
"Oh, no, he doesn't, not in the least."
"Well, I—" she held the personal pronoun for emphasis—"think he does."
In this good opinion she was able to be firm because she seemed older than he. In reality she was two years younger, but life in a larger society had given her something of the tone of a woman of the world. This development on her part disconcerted him. So long as she had been the slip of a thing he remembered, prim, sedate, old-fashioned as the term is applied to children, she had not been a factor in his relations with the Ansley family. Now, suddenly, he saw her as the most important factor of all. The emergence of personality troubled him. Since she was obliged to keep her eyes on the turnings of the road, he was able to study her in profile.
It was the first time he had really looked at a woman since he had summed up Maisie in Nashua. That had been two months earlier. The place which Maisie had so long held in his heart had been empty for those two months, except for a great bitterness. It was the bitterness of disillusion, of futility. Rage and pain were in it, with more of mortification than there was of either. He would never again hear of a cheap skate without thinking of the figure he had cut in the eyes of the girl whom he thought he was honoring merely in being true. All girls had been hateful to him since that day, just as all boys will be to a dog who has been stoned by one of them. Yet here he was already looking at a girl with something like fascination.
That was because fascination was the emotion she evoked. She was strange; she was arresting. You wondered what she was like. You watched her when she moved; you listened to her when she talked. Once you had heard her voice, bell-like and crystalline, you would always be able to recall it.
He noticed the way she was dressed because her knitted silk sweater was of a pattern he had never seen before. It ran in horizontal dog-toothed bands, shading from green to blue, and from blue to a dull red. Green was the predominating color, grass-green, jade-green, sea-green, sage-green, but toned to sobriety by this red of old brick, this blue of indigo. Indigo was the short plain skirt, and the stockings below it. An indigo tam-o'-shanter was pinned to her smooth, glossy, bluish-black hair with a big carnelian pin. He remembered that he used to think her Cambodian. He thought so again.