She was a decided brunette. Her eyes as they met his had a certain defiant challenge, a challenge at once bold and baffling. The distance between her eyes was a trifle too great for perfect beauty, but her complexion was transparently pale, and her teeth were wonderfully white and even. The poise of her head was almost regal, and she had a trick of coming very close to one as she talked, that was very disconcerting.
On the whole, Miss Yarnell was a charming person of twenty-three or four, and he began to have a decided appreciation of the adjective Polly Cresap had applied to her. Moreover, the sombre challenge in her dark eyes impelled him to further investigation, under the clatter of teacups and small talk about them.
“Why ‘celebrated,’ Miss Yarnell?” he began. “Why ‘celebrated’ rather than ‘beautiful’ or ‘stunning’ or downright ‘handsome’?”
“Polly’s rather silly,” said Miss Yarnell.
“Are you dodging?”
“I never dodge. But Polly is silly—yes, she’s unkind, although she’d be in tears if she dreamed I thought so. She ought not to have called me that. No, I don’t dodge, but I suppose I can refuse to answer.”
He declined to notice the ungraciousness of her response. “Oh, of course, but I’m certain to learn the reason you’re ‘celebrated’ from some one—badly garbled, too,” he laughed.
Contrary to the spirit of his badinage, she seemed resolved to take him seriously. “That’s true. I may as well tell you. I’m celebrated—‘notorious’ would be a better word—because of that affair in Baltimore last year. I was an idiot.”
“Hard words for yourself. I think I don’t understand.”
“You don’t know Baltimore, then?”