"Can't make it out," he would say at breakfast, after a party; "dances well; dresses well; but doesn't take. Fellows afraid of her. Everybody shy of a girl who isn't popular. Hasn't enough devil. Girl ought to have some devil, hang it all! Dance with her myself? Well, I do—about three times a year. Have her left on my hands an hour at a time. Fellow can't afford that. Think we have no chivalry? Should come to dances yourself, old chap. You'd be a godsend to the girls in the dump."
Thor's dancing days were over before Lois's had begun, but he could imagine what they had been to her. He could look back over the four or five years that separated her from the ordeal, and still see her in "the dump"—tall, timid, furtively watching the young men with those swimming brown orbs of hers, wondering whether or not she should have a partner; heartsore under her finery, often driving homeward in the weary early hours with tears streaming down her cheeks. He knew as much about it as if he had been with her. He suffered for her retrospectively. He did it to a degree that made his long face sorrowful.
The sorrow caused Lois some impatience. "For mercy's sake, Thor, don't look at me like that! It isn't as bad as you seem to think. I don't mind it."
"But I do," he declared, with indignation, only to feel that he was slowly coloring.
He colored because the statement brought him within measurable distance of a declaration which he meant to make, but for which he was not ready.
She seemed to divine his embarrassment, speaking with forced lightness. "Please don't waste your sympathy on me. If any one's to be pitied, it's mamma. I'm such a disappointment to her. Let's talk of something else. Where have you been to-day, and what have you been doing?"
He was not blind to her tact, counting it to her credit for the future, and asked abruptly if she knew Fay, the gardener.
"Fay, the gardener?" she echoed. "I know who he is." She went more directly to the point in saying, "I know his daughter."
"Well, she's having a hard time."
"Is she? I should think she might."