"YOU had!" exclaimed Arkwright.
"A woman always keeps a careful list of eligibles," explained she. "As Lucy Burke told me he was headed for Washington, I put him on my list that very night—well down toward the bottom, but, still, on it. I had quite forgotten him until to-night."
Arkwright was staring at her. Her perfect frankness, absolute naturalness with him, unreserved trust of him, gave him a guilty feeling for the bitter judgment on her character which he had secretly formed as the result of her confidences. "Yet, really," thought he, "she's quite the nicest girl I know, and the cleverest. If she had hid herself from me, as the rest do, I'd never for one instant have suspected her of having so much—so much—calm, good sense—for that's all it amounts to." He decided it was a mistake for any human being in any circumstances to be absolutely natural and unconcealingly candid. "We're such shallow fakers," reflected he, "that if any one confesses to us things not a tenth part as bad as what we privately think and do, why, we set him—or her—especially her—down as a living, breathing atrocity in pants or petticoats."
Margaret was of the women who seem never to think of what they are really absorbed in, and never to look at what they are really scrutinizing. She disconcerted him by interrupting his reflections with: "Your private opinion of me is of small consequence to me, Grant, beside the relief and the joy of being able to say my secret self aloud. Also"—here she grew dizzy at her own audacity in the frankness that fools—"Also, if I wished to get you, Grant, or any man, I'd not be silly enough to fancy my character or lack of it would affect him. That isn't what wins men—is it?"
"You and Josh Craig have a most uncomfortable way of answering people's thoughts," said Arkwright. "Now, how did you guess I was thinking mean things about you?"
"For the same reason that Mr. Craig is able to guess what's going on in your head."
"And that reason is—"
She laughed mockingly. "Because I know you, Grant Arkwright—you, the meanest-generous man, and the most generous-mean man the Lord ever permitted. The way to make you generous is to give you a mean impulse; the way to make you mean is to set you to fearing you're in danger of being generous."
"There's a bouquet with an asp coiled in it," said Arkwright, pleased; for with truly human vanity he had accepted the compliment and had thrown away the criticism. "I'll go bring Josh Craig."
"No, not to-night," said Miss Severence, with a sudden compression of the lips and a stern, almost stormy contraction of the brows.