The young man was deeply interested.
“Well,” he admitted, “there’s a good deal in what you say, Penelope. You talk about it all as though you were a diplomat yourself.”
“Perhaps I am,” she answered calmly. “A stray young woman like myself must have something to occupy her thoughts, you know.”
He laughed.
“That’s not bad,” he asserted, “for a girl whom the New York Herald declared, a few weeks ago, to be one of the most brilliant young women in English society.”
She shrugged her shoulders scornfully.
“That’s just the sort of thing the New York Herald would say,” she remarked. “You see, I have to get a reputation for being smart and saying bright things, or nobody would ask me anywhere. Penniless American young women are not too popular over here.”
“Marry me, then,” he suggested amiably. “I shall have plenty of money some day.”
“I’ll see about it when you’re grown up,” she answered. “Just at present, I think we’d better return to the subject of Hamilton Fynes.”
Mr. Richard Vanderpole sighed, but seemed not disinclined to follow her suggestion.