“Langdon has the anti-germ fad,” said I. She answered “Yes” after a pause, and in such a strained voice that I looked at her. A flush was just dying out of her face. “He was the friend I spoke of,” she went on.
“You know him very well?” I asked.
“We've known him—always,” said she. “I think he's one of my earliest recollections. His father's summer place and ours adjoin. And once—I guess it's the first time I remember seeing him—he was a freshman at Harvard, and he came along on a horse past the pony cart in which a groom was driving me. And I—I was very little then—I begged him to take me up, and he did. I thought he was the greatest, most wonderful man that ever lived.” She laughed queerly. “When I said my prayers, I used to imagine a god that looked like him to say them to.”
I echoed her laugh heartily. The idea of Mowbray Langdon as a god struck me as peculiarly funny, though natural enough, too.
“Absurd, wasn't it?” said she. But her face was grave, and she let her cigarette die out.
“I guess you know him better than that now?”
“Yes—better,” she answered, slowly and absently. “He's—anything but a god!”
“And the more fascinating on that account,” said I. “I wonder why women like best the really bad, dangerous sort of man, who hasn't any respect for them, or for anything.”
I said this that she might protest, at least for herself. But her answer was a vague, musing, “I wonder—I wonder.”
“I'm sure you wouldn't,” I protested earnestly, for her.