Pauline was amused by this. With his unfailing instinct, Scarborough had felt—and had never permitted himself to forget—that there was some sort of wall round her for him. It was in perfect good faith that she answered Olivia: "You don't understand him. He's a queer man—sometimes I wonder myself that he doesn't get just a little sentimental. I suppose I'd find him exasperating—if I weren't otherwise engaged."
Olivia tried not to show irritation at this reference to Dumont. "I think you're mistaken about which of you is queer," she said. "You are the one—not he."
"I?" Pauline laughed—she was thinking of her charm against any love but one man's, the wedding ring she always wore at her neck. "Why, I COULDN'T fall in love with HIM."
"The woman who gets him will do mighty well for herself—in every way," said Olivia.
"Indeed she will. But—I'd as soon think of falling in love with a tree or a mountain."
She liked her phrase; it seemed to her exactly to define her feeling for Scarborough. She liked it so well that she repeated it to herself reassuringly many times in the next few weeks.
VII.
PAULINE AWAKENS.
In the last week of March came a succession of warm rains. The leaves burst from their impatient hiding just within the cracks in the gray bark. And on Monday the unclouded sun was irradiating a pale green world from a pale blue sky. The four windows of Pauline and Olivia's sitting-room were up; a warm, scented wind was blowing this way and that the strays of Pauline's red-brown hair as she sat at the table, her eyes on a book, her thoughts on a letter—Dumont's first letter on landing in America. A knock, and she frowned slightly.