"What a poor opinion of men you mean," retorted she. "After a little experience of them a girl—even a girl—learns that they are incapable of any emotion that isn't gross."
"Don't be so ladylike, Jane," said Hull.
Miss Hastings was recovering control of herself. She took a new tack. "You haven't asked her yet?"
"Hardly. This is the second time I've seen her. I suspected that she was the woman for me the moment I saw her. To-day I confirmed my idea. She is all that I thought—and more. And, Jane, I know that you appreciate her, too."
Jane now saw that Davy was being thus abruptly and speedily confiding because he had decided it was the best way out of his entanglement with her. Behind his coolness she could see an uneasy watchfulness—the fear that she might try to hold him. Up boiled her rage—the higher because she knew that if there were any possible way of holding Davy, she would take it—not because she wished to, or would, marry him, but because she had put her mark upon him. But this new rage was of the kind a clever woman has small difficulty in dissembling.
"Indeed I do appreciate her, Davy," said she sweetly. "And I hope you will be happy with her."
"You think I can get her?" said he, fatuously eager. "You think she likes me? I've been rather hoping that because it seized me so suddenly and so powerfully it must have seized her, too. I think often things occur that way."
"In novels," said Jane, pleasantly judicial. "But in real life about the hardest thing to do is for a man to make a woman care for him—really care for him."
"Well, no matter how hard I have to try——"
"Of course," pursued Miss Hastings, ignoring his interruption, "when a man who has wealth and position asks a woman who hasn't to marry him, she usually accepts—unless he happens to be downright repulsive, or she happens to be deeply and hopefully in love with another man."