"Ah, well, Tiny, I am quite sure he loves you."
"Not very deeply, I hope; I can't altogether believe in him, and I don't much want to. It is bad enough to have one of them in deadly earnest," added Christina after a pause, but with a laugh.
"Is one of them—I mean another one?" asked Ruth, correcting herself quickly.
Tiny nodded. She would not say who it was. "I don't care for him either—not enough," she, however, vouchsafed.
"Then you don't think of marrying him, I hope?"
"No, not the man I mean"—she shook her head sadly at trees and sky—"I like him too much to marry him unless I loved him. Only if anyone else asked me—someone I didn't perhaps care a scrap for—I don't know what mightn't happen. I feel so reckless sometimes, and so sick of everything! This comes of having played at it so often that one is incapable of the real thing; more than all, it comes of growing up with no higher ideal than a happy marriage. And there must be something so much nobler—if one only knew what!"
Very wistfully her eyes wandered over the fading sky. The thin, floating clouds, fast disappearing in the darkness, were not less vague than her desires, and not more lofty. Her soul was tugging at a chain that had been too seldom taut.
"I know of nothing—unless you're a bluestocking," suggested poor Ruth, "or go in for Woman's Rights!"
Then the sights and sounds of the place came suddenly home to Christina, and her eyes fell. A child rattled by with an iron hoop. A pleasure boat, villainously rowed, passed with hoarse shouts through the pillar of fire below the bridge and left it writhing. Her eyes as she lowered them were greeted with the smarting smoke of a cigar, and her nostrils with the smell that priced it. The smoker took a neighboring chair, or rather two, for he was not without his companion.
Christina was the first to rise.