Adele
Dr. Harpe folded the letter and put it away.
"Don't I though?" she said grimly.
She frowned as Van Lennop's low, amused laugh, mingling with Essie Tisdale's merry trill, reached her through the open window.
"The presumptuous little upstart! The biscuit-shooter!" Dr. Harpe's face was not pleasant to see.
She took care to keep to herself what she had learned for when they met, as she was now determined that they should, she wished the friendship she meant to proffer to seem above all else disinterested. While she realized that she had his prejudice to overcome, she believed that she could overcome it and she would wait now with eagerness for the opportunity to insert the opening wedge.
Heretofore the dubious compliment "a good fellow," from the men with whom she smoked and drank, had pleased and satisfied her. She had no desire to appeal to them in any other way; but this was different because Ogden Van Lennop was different, being the first really eligible man who had ever come within the circle to which she had been limited by her always straitened circumstances. She looked upon Van Lennop in the light of an exceptional business chance, and with a conceit oddly at variance with her eminently practical nature, she believed she had only to set about exerting herself in earnest to arouse his interest and attach him to herself.
Van Lennop found himself still smiling at Essie Tisdale's sallies as he came up the stairs. Her droll originality amused him as he had not been amused in a long time, and he found himself unbending to a degree which often surprised himself; besides, with her frankness, her naturalness and perfect unconsciousness of any social barrier, she seemed to him a perfect western type. He prized the novel friendship, for it had become that, and would have regretted keenly anything which might have interrupted it.
Her realistic descriptions of the episodes of a small town were irresistible and Van Lennop never found himself more genuinely entertained than when after a certain set form of greeting which they went through daily with the greatest gravity, he would inquire—
"Well, Miss Tisdale, what are the developments in the world to-day?" And with her quick, dimpling smile she would respond with some item of local news which took its humor chiefly from the telling.