As a matter of course, Kindelon and Courtlandt soon met each other in Pauline's drawing-room. Courtlandt was quite as quiet as usual, and the Irishman perhaps rather unwontedly voluble. Pauline thought she had never heard her new friend talk better. He made his departure before her cousin, and when he had gone Pauline said, with candid enthusiasm:
"Isn't he a wonderful man?"
"Wonderful?" repeated Courtlandt, a trifle drowsily.
She gave him a keen look, and bristled visibly while she did so. "Certainly!" she declared. "No other word just expresses him. I didn't observe you very closely, Court," she went on, "but I took it for granted that you were being highly interested. I can't imagine your not being."
"He gave me a kind of singing in the ears," said Courtlandt. "I've got it yet. He makes me think of one of those factories where there's a violent hubbub all the time, so that you have to speak loud if you want to be heard."
Pauline was up in arms, then. "I never listened to a more scandalously unjust criticism!" she exclaimed. "Do you mean to tell me, unblushingly, that you do not think him a very extraordinary person?"
"Oh, very," said her cousin.
Pauline gave an exasperated sigh. "I am so used to you," she said, "that I should never even be surprised by you. But you need not pretend that you can have any except one truthful opinion about Mr. Kindelon."
"I haven't," was the reply. "He's what they call a smart newspaper man. A Bohemian chap, you know. They're nearly all of them just like that. They can talk you deaf, dumb, and blind, if you only give them a chance."
"I don't think the dumbness required any great effort, as far as you were concerned!" declared Pauline, with sarcastic belligerence.