"I'm sorry you haven't time to listen," he said. "I have news for you." Then, as she fell into a slower step, he added, with an abrupt change to a slightly hectoring tone: "We passed that young Culpeper just now. Did you see him?"
She shook her head disdainfully. "I wasn't looking at him."
"He may have been on his way to the mansion." There was a taunting note in his voice, as if he were trying deliberately to work her into a temper.
"It doesn't matter." She spoke flippantly. "I don't care whether he was or not."
Gershom laughed. "That sounds good to me even if I take it with a grain of salt. I was beginning to be afraid that you liked him."
She turned on him angrily. "What business is that of yours?"
His amiability, as soon as he had struck fire, became imperturbable. "Well, I've known you a long time, Patty, and I take an interest in you, you see. Now, I don't fancy this young Culpeper. He is a conceited sort of ass like his father before him, the sort that thinks all clover is his fodder."
Though Gershom would have scorned philosophy had he ever heard of it, he was well grounded in that practical knowledge of human perversity from which all philosophers and most philosophic systems have sprung. Had his next words been barbed with steel they could not have pierced Patty's girlish pride more sharply. "I reckon he imagines all he's got to do is to look sweet at a girl, and she'll fall at his feet."
Patty's eyes flashed with anger. "He is not unusual in that, is he?" she asked mockingly.
"Well, you can't accuse me of that, Patty," said Gershom, with a sincerity which made him appear less offensively oily. "I never looked long at but one girl in my life, not since I first saw you, anyway—and I don't seem ever to have had an idea that she would fall at my feet. But I didn't bring you out here to begin kidding. I want to talk to you about the Governor, and I was afraid he would catch on to something if we stayed indoors."