"Oh, yes, the well-known capitalist class," Isabel said impatiently. "But you're one and he likes you."
"I come in a different category," Rod answered grimly. "I despise the tin-horn capitalist whose only god is capital more than Andy Hall does. It's part of a social theory with Andy. It's a personal feud with me. I'm suffering from the manipulations of that type of gold-digger. It has just about ruined me and has caused me to risk all that several generations of honest, generous-minded men built up, including a home many of us love—and a reputation for integrity besides. But Andy happens to know me as a man apart from my present dubious position as a capitalist. He doesn't really know you as a woman. He may be in love with you. Probably is, because you are an attractive little devil—"
"I thank you very much, kind sir," Isabel interrupted mockingly.
"But," Rod went on unheeding, "unless he were absolutely sure you would, as Christ told the man who wanted to be saved, 'Leave all that thou hast and follow Me,' a donkey engine couldn't pull a declaration of any sort out of him. Don't you see? Andy's full of sinful pride. He's class-conscious. He knows your kind of people better than you do, and he knows they regard him as belonging to an inferior order. He would chew his heart up and spit it out in little pieces before he'd let any flirtatious daughter of the idle rich have it for a curio in her collection. You've talked and laughed with him here in our house. You call him Andy and he calls you Isabel. But remember that he knows what manners are, and that being genial, even pleasantly intimate to the point of plaguing him the way you do, doesn't really mean anything. He's my trusted superintendent, and he draws a corking good salary which he faithfully earns, but he knows that wouldn't prevent a person like you from cutting him dead if he met you in, say the Vancouver Hotel Dubarry Room, hanging on the arm of, well, Sir Earnest Staples of Government House, Victoria."
"Never," Isabel protested. "I'm no snob."
"I didn't say you would. But it's been done. You've seen that sort of thing pulled," Rod continued. "Andy knows he doesn't belong in your crowd. What's more, he doesn't want to. He has seen quite clearly from the outside what you've seen from the inside, and come to the same conclusion. But he doesn't know you've arrived at such a conclusion. I didn't know it myself. You poke fun at them, of course. But you play the game with them right along, and you camouflage your real attitude toward life with Andy, with me, with us all. In fact, you'd have a hard time convincing any one, offhand, that you ever had a serious thought in your life. So how do you expect Andy to take you seriously?"
"But must one pull a long face and go about spreading the philosophy of disillusion and appealing for sympathy?" Isabel protested. "I can't help it if I'm mostly a cheerful idiot. How am I to make Andy understand that—that I—that—"
She choked up. And Rod felt intensely sorry for her at that moment. But he knew of no way to help.
"I said I'd tell you, and I'll try," he went on gently. "If you really do love Andy Hall and want him, you had better sometime just put your arms around his neck and tell him so."
Isabel looked away. A deep flush colored her white neck and spread upward until it was lost in the roots of her yellow fluff of bobbed hair.