"You know you're talking nonsense. You'll allow I met her under peculiar circumstances."
"After helping you to fish her out of an Italian lake, I will allow the circumstances were romantic."
"I thought she—"
"Of course, love at first sight. Just the thing to fetch you."
"I thought she liked me as a girl at home might have liked me, who hadn't heard that my grandfather—"
He thumped out an oath as he thrust his hands deep down in his yachtman's jacket.
De Poincy smiled.
"She's so young," Gano went on—"probably less sophisticated, I thought, than our American girls."
"To be sure, a ravishing ingénue."
"And here she was, ready to throw over poor Parthenay like that"—he tossed his cigarette overboard—"caring for him all the time, as Parthenay showed me. Then this ingénue, after turning the Tallmadge dollars into francs in her pretty baby head, was calmly arranging to help me to spend them here in France. How the devil they knew on such short acquaintance—before the settlement question came up—"