"It's quite true I've got a lot of men friends, or at least I had. I've given up men now, since the one I was engaged to treated me so badly. You know, I told you about him.... When that happened I said, Thank you, that's enough for me, I said. I know what men are now, and I shan't have anything more to do with them."
"But it's not like you to be bitter," Nicholas said, in a gentle, puzzled way.
His ear and his trained mind alike noted the futility of her speech, but his masculinity was all the while increasingly aware of that in her which, for want of a better word, he could only describe as animal magnetism.
In her, it was extraordinarily powerful.
"Sometimes," declared Doris inconsistently, "I just think I'll marry the next man that asks me."
The suggestion, for reasons that he did not attempt to analyze, somehow affected Nicholas disagreeably.
"Oh, I don't think I should do that if I were you," he gravely objected.
"Why not? Men are all rotten, anyway—it doesn't make much odds which of them one takes in the end."
Her cheap cynicism made Nicholas vaguely uncomfortable. He looked at her without speaking.
As though Doris, by means of some odd intuition of her own, had guessed his disapproval, she changed her tone suddenly.