She laughed. "Cave man stuff, eh?"
He let her go. She had the most perfect way of reducing him to ridicule.
"I love you," he said. "I love you. Aren't you going to try, even to try, to love me back?"
"No."
"Not ever?"
"Never." She went up to him and stood straight and slim and bewitching, eye to eye. "If you want me to love you, make me. Work for it, move Heaven and earth. You can't leave it to me. I don't want to love you. I'm perfectly happy as I am. If you want me, win me, carry me off my feet and then you shall see what it is to be loved. It's entirely up to you, understand that. I shall fight against it tooth and nail, but I give you leave to do your best. Do you accept the challenge?"
"Yes," he said, and his face cleared, and his eyes blazed.
V
At the moment when the Nice Boy, as brown as the proverbial berry, was playing a round of golf with Joan within sound of the sea, Howard Oldershaw, his cousin, drove up to the little house in East Sixty-fifth Street to see Martin.
He, too, had caught the sun, and his round fat face was rounder and fatter than ever. He, too, had the epitome of health, good nature, and misdirected energy. He performed a brief but very perfect double shuffle on the top step while waiting for the door to open, and then barged past the constitutionally unsurprised man servant, sang out a loud woo-hoo and blew into the library like an equinoctial gale.