“Don’t prevaricate. You wouldn’t do it well. As I was about to say, I wish to be friends with you. And it’s impossible for a woman and a man to be friends when either is harbouring matrimonial designs against the other, or fancies the other is harbouring them.”
“I certainly have to marry somebody,” said Frothingham mournfully.
“Yes—I know. Father explained about you. He’s up on every titled family in England above the baronets. And he’s determined that I shall be a countess at the very least. He says he has the money to buy it—and possibly he has. But”—she was intent upon the blackness again—“I shall never go back to England. I shall stay in America—with a visit to Paris and the Riviera now and then.”
“That’ll cheer your father when he hears it,” drawled Frothingham. He coughed and stammered, and added in an embarrassed, apologetic tone, “And I don’t like to hear a girl as young and attractive as you are talk in that ghastly way.”
She looked at him with a teasing smile.
“You’ll make some woman a good husband,” she said. “Selfish and flighty, perhaps, but on the whole good. I’ll be glad to help you—with some other girl. In fact, I’ve one in mind—an acquaintance in New York—we call each the other friend, and I’m fond of her, as that sort of thing goes with women.”
He began to stammer again, and she saw that he was still hanging hopefully over her father’s plan. “If I were a marrying woman and ambitious,” she went on, “I’d think seriously of having a cast at you. But I’m neither, so I can appreciate your assets quite impartially.”
“I’ve got nothing,” he said, “nothing but debts.”
“Debts are an asset—if contracted in a way that would seem romantic to a girl. Then, there’s your title. That’s a big asset either in England or America. And you’ve got a fairly good disposition and nice manners, and you pretend indifference charmingly, assisted by your eyeglass. And your character is not too bad. Not too good, either. I’ve heard one or two rather thick stories of you. If I were your wife I’d keep an eye on the money—you will gamble. But your character is well up to the average for our kind of people.”
“I’ve been rather bad, I’m afraid,” he said, in the shallowly penitent tone in which human beings glory in the sins they are proud of. “I’ve been as bad as I knew how to be.”