"I don't want to marry any Dukes, thanks."
"I'm sure I don't want you to," Mr. Ryan had said softly. "I'd miss you too much myself...."
The fact is that he was a flirt for the moment out of work. He was also of the type that delights in the proximity of "Girl"—using the word as one who should say "Game." "Girl" suggested to him, as to many young men, a collective mass of that which is pretty, soft, and to-be-made-love-to. He found it pleasant to keep his hand in by paying these compliments to this new instalment of Girl—who was rather a little pet, he thought, though rather slow.
As for Gwenna, she bloomed under it, gaining also in poise. She learned to take a compliment as if it were an offered flower, instead of dodging it like a brick-bat, which is the very young girl's failing. She found that even if receiving a compliment from the wrong man is like wearing a right-hand glove on the left hand, it is better than having no gloves. (Especially it is better than looking as if one had no gloves.)
The attentions of young Ryan, his comment on a new summer frock, the rose laid by him on her desk in the morning; these things were not without their effect—it was a different effect from any intended by the red-haired pupil, who was her teacher in all this.
She would find herself thinking, "He doesn't look at me nearly so much, I notice, in a trimmed-up hat, or a 'fussy' blouse. Men don't like them on me, perhaps." (That blouse or hat would be discarded.) Or, "Well! if so-and-so about me pleases him, it'll please other men."
And for "men" she read always, always the same one. She never realised that if she had not met Paul Dampier she might have fallen in love with young Peter Ryan. Presently he had begged her to call him "Peter."
She wouldn't.
"I think I'd do anything for you," young Ryan had urged, "if you asked for it, using my Christian name!"
Gwenna had replied: "Very well! If there's anything I ever want, frightfully badly, that you could give me, I shall ask for it like that."