"Oh, well, we won't split hairs. You wouldn't stay, and you might easily have stayed. You pleaded stress of business, and you hadn't any, or this appearance up-town at so early an hour couldn't have taken place."
"It is remarkable," said Courtlandt, with his gravest serenity, "how you pierce through people's pitiful disguises. You make me feel conscience-stricken by a realization of my own deceit."
"That is fortunate," said Pauline, with a slight, curt laugh. "For then you will, perhaps, express your disapprobation less impudently."
"I might speak pretty plainly to you and yet not be at all impudent."
Pauline threw back her head with a defiant stolidity. "Oh, speak as plainly as you please," she said. "I shall have my own views of just how impudent you are. I generally have."
"You did something that was a good deal off color for a woman who wants herself always regarded as careful of the proprieties. I found you doing it, and I was shocked, as you say."
Pauline straightened herself in her chair. "I don't know what you mean," she replied, a little crisply, "by 'off color.' I suppose it is slang, and I choose, with a good reason, to believe that it conveys an unjustly contemptuous estimate of my very harmless act. I took a stroll along that beautiful Battery with a friend."
"With an adventuring newspaper fellow, you mean," said Courtlandt, cool as always, but a little more sombre.
Pauline rose. "I will stand a certain amount of rudeness toward myself," she declared, "but I will not stand sneers at Mr. Kindelon. No doubt if you had met me walking with some empty-headed fop, like Fyshkille, or Van Arsdale, you would have thought my conduct perfectly proper."
"I'd have thought it devilish odd," said Courtlandt, "and rather bad form. I've no more respect for those fellows than you have. But if you got engaged to one of them I shouldn't call it a horrible disaster."