Then the other, with that recurrent though only half-conscious need to show that after all, she, Hildegarde, wasn’t dazzled—not being in Bella’s state, she could see blemishes—the older girl would add: “And yet somehow for all his niceness, and making us always have a good time when he’s there, to my thinking there’s something terribly unromantic about Louis Cheviot.”
“Now you only say that,” retorts Miss Bella, with sparkling eyes, “because he’s in a bank.”
“No—no,” vaguely, “but I don’t believe he’s got any soul.”
“Just because he isn’t hunting the North Pole!”
“No. That isn’t the reason. I assure you it isn’t.”
“Then it can only be because he likes to laugh at everything.”
“He is pretty frivolous,” said Hildegarde, “and he ridicules friendship. But no, it’s not that, either. It’s because he’s kind of chilling. To me.”
“Chilling to you?” Bella beamed. “Oh, do tell me about that.”
“Sometimes he’s positively rude.”
“To you?” Bella could have danced.