“Well—well,” said Richmond, still good-humored though not so easily. “It’d be foolish for us to quarrel about him. You say he has refused you.”
“Yes—but I haven’t given him up.”
“That isn’t a very nice way for a girl to talk—is it now, my dear?” said Richmond, laughing with some constraint.
“Why not?” said she.
“It’s the man’s place to do the courting and the proposing. And if the man doesn’t want you I’m sure you’ve got too much modesty and pride to——”
“I don’t know whether I have or not,” interrupted Beatrice. “I’ve got a lot of you in me. I can’t imagine anything I wouldn’t do to get him if I thought it would help. And I haven’t thought of much else but of different schemes to bring him round. I’m like you are when you see a railroad you want.”
“But there’s nothing you can do, Beatrice,” remonstrated her father.
“No—it seems not,” she assented despondently. “Oh, how it enrages me to be a woman! When a man sees a girl he recognizes as the very best for him, one he can’t and won’t do without, he goes after her—straight out—and everybody applauds. It ought to be so with a girl.”
“God forbid!” cried Richmond, laughing.
“Oh, the men wouldn’t be bothered as much as you seem to think. Not many of them are tremendously worth while. The women feel about most of them like——”