“But why? why? why?” she urged him, her flexible eyebrows raised in the eagerness of her inquiry. “I feel just as though I were going to hear the answer to a perfectly maddeningly unanswerable riddle.”
He had another turn in his attempt at evasion. “It wouldn’t be polite to tell you the answer, for what I’m trying to do is to get out of being what everybody you know thinks is the only way to be—except Dr. Melton, of course.”
“What’s the matter with ‘all the people I know,’” she challenged him explicitly.
He laughed and shook his head. “Oh, I’ve nothing new to say about them. Everybody has said it, from Ecclesiastes to Tolstoi.”
“They never say anything about just ordinary folks in Endbury that I know.”
Rankin looked at her whimsically. “Oh, don’t they?”
“Do they?” Lydia wondered at the possibility. Presently she brought out, as a patently absurd supposition, “You don’t mean to say that Endbury people are wicked?”
“Do you think that none but wicked people are written about in serious books? No; Lord, no! I don’t think they are wicked—just mistaken.”
“What about? Now we’re getting warm. I’ll guess in a minute.”
He looked a little sadly down at her bright, eager face. “I’m afraid you would never guess. It’s all gone into your blood. You breathe it in and out as you live, every minute.”