"I'm very glad to hear it."
"I'm no more to blame than Mr. Burleigh was. He knew about it as well as I did, but Mrs. Chints was bound to carry out her project."
"Will you permit a suggestion?"
"I suppose you wish to insinuate that I acted like a heathen, instead of saying that I am one plainly, as does Cousin Ik?"
"I think you acted a little thoughtlessly. If Miss Burton had been in your place, she would have tried to prevent the disagreeable scene."
"Oh, certainly! she is perfect."
"No; she is kind."
"Would it be possible to speak upon some agreeable subject, Mr.
Van Berg? I have had enough mortifications for one day."
He was puzzled. What topic could he introduce that would interest this spoiled and petulant beauty.
He touched on art, but she was only artful in her small way, and could not follow him. He tried literature, and here they had even less in common. He would not and indeed could not read the thin society novels which reflected modes of life as trivial as her own, and his books might have been written in another language, so slight was her acquaintance with them. The various political, social, or scientific questions of the day had never puzzled her brain. Van Berg cautiously felt his way towards his companion's knowledge of two or three of the most popular of them. Her answers, however, were so superficial and irrelevant, and also so evidently embarrassed, that he saw his only resources to be society chit-chat, gossip about mutual acquaintances, the latest modes, the attractions of pleasure resorts in the city, and of summer resorts in the country. But he gave his mind to these unwonted themes, and labored hard to be entertaining; for now that he had gained the vantage-ground he sought, he was determined to discover whether there was a sleeping mind or a vacuum behind Miss Mayhew's shapely forehead. Granting that there was a womanly intelligence there, as yet unquickened, he was not so irrational as to imagine he could jostle it into illumining activity in one short hour, or day, or week. But it seemed to him that if any mind existed worth the name, it would give such encouraging signs of life before many days passed as would promise success of his experiment. He felt that his first aim must be to establish an intimacy that would permit as full and frank an exchange of thought as was possible between people so dissimilar.