It was on the tip of my tongue to reply that it was my duty as Conductor to be so, and that, if I succeeded, a mountain full of hidden treasure might perhaps reward me. But just in time I realized that this speech would not be tactful. Instead of speaking, I looked at her and let her go on.
"It's Harry Snell," she said. "You have influence with him. He thinks you such a great swell, he'd hate to do anything you would call unworthy of a gentleman. He—he's making me so unhappy. He's done —everything—to win my love and now—now he's gone over to that Miss Guest." The donkey having begun inopportunely to trot, the words were jolted out, one after another, like a shower of pebbles. And they fell on my feelings like paving stones. She expected me to do something about it! Horrible! I should almost have preferred the proposal.
"My dear Miss Biddell," I soothed her in my best salad-oil voice, cultivated at the Embassy, "you are much prettier than Miss Guest, and you can win Snell back easily if you want him. Probably he's only flirting, to make you jealous."
"It's me he was flirting with," she moaned. "But I don't believe he cares for Miss Guest. It's only a case of 'follow my leader,' because other men like her so much. Nothing succeeds like success, you know. And other men's admiration is the most becoming background a girl can have. He told Mrs. Harlow it was haunting him, that Elaine and I would get fat like our mother, and the men who married us would have to spend dull years seeing us slowly grow into mother's likeness. Wasn't it cruel? And we eat scarcely anything except pickles on purpose to keep thin. But that's only his excuse. It's the romance of the situation, and the secret that appeals to him."
"What secret?" I felt entitled to inquire.
"Why, the secret between those two girls, Miss Gilder and Miss Guest. You know what all the men believe about them, don't you? But of course you do."
"But of course I don't."
"Why, that they've changed places, to deceive people, just as heiresses and poor girls do in old-fashioned plays or books. They think Miss Gilder (I mean the girl we call Miss Gilder) is really the school-teacher, and the one we call Miss Guest, and that all the men are after, is Rosamond Gilder the cannon heiress."
"Whew!" I whistled, bumpily, as my donkey kept up with Enid's. "For goodness' sake, what makes them think that?"
"I don't know exactly how the story started, but it seems authentic. Have you known them long?"