“Oh, Christine, what nonsense!” Patty blushed rosy-red, but tried to laugh it off. “Why, he’s old enough to be my father.”
“No, he isn’t. He’s thirty-five,—that’s a lot older than you,—but, all the same, he adores you.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Christine,” said Patty, with a new note of hauteur in her voice. “Mr. Hepworth is my very good friend, and I look up to him in every way, but there is no affection or any such foolishness between us.”
“Not on your side, perhaps; but there is on his.”
“Well, if you think so, I don’t want to hear about it. When you talk like that, it just goes to spoil the nice pleasant friendship that Mr. Hepworth and I have had for years.”
“It isn’t the same as you have for Roger Farrington and Kenneth Harper.”
“It is! Just the same. Except that Mr. Hepworth is so much older that I never call him by his first name. The others were my school chums. Look here, Christine, we’re going to be very good friends, you and I,—but, if you talk to me like that about Mr. Hepworth, you’ll queer our friendship at its very beginning. Now, quit it,—will you?”
“Yes, I will, Patty. And I didn’t mean any harm. I only wanted you to know Mr. Hepworth’s attitude toward you.”
“Well, when I want to know it, I’ll discover it for myself, or let him tell me. You must know, Christine, that I’m not bothering about such things. I don’t want affection, as you call it, from any man. I like my boy friends, or my men friends, but there’s no sentiment or sentimentality between me and any one of them? Are you on?”
“On what?” asked Christine, a little bewildered at Patty’s emphatic speech.