"And you confine your curiosity to your own business?"
"Not entirely," he answered, and wondered if she were experimenting with the letter "C". "For instance I am curious about you."
Her eyes challenged him with their old defiance. "And I am certainly not your business."
"I admit that you are not—but that does not decrease my curiosity."
For a moment her smile grew wistful. "And what, I wonder," she asked, with the faintest quiver of her cherry-coloured lips, "would you like to know?"
"Oh, everything!" he replied unhesitatingly. There was no longer in his mind the slightest wish to avoid the approaching flirtation. On the contrary, he felt he should welcome it, if she would only continue to look like this. She was not beautiful—yet he realized that she did not need beauty when she could play so easily with a look or a smile on the heartstrings. A rush of tenderness overwhelmed his reserve at the very instant when her lashes trembled and drooped, and she murmured in a whisper that enchanted him: "Oh, but everything is too little." Though it was only the old lure of youth and sex, he felt that it was as divinely fresh and wonderful as first love.
"Is it too little?" he asked, and his voice sounded so far off that it was faint in his ears.
She raised her lashes and gave him a glance charged with meaning. "That depends," she answered, and suddenly, without warning, she passed to the lightest and gayest of tones. "Everything depends on something else, doesn't it? Now Father is coming out, and I must run upstairs and dress."
It was a dismissal, he knew, and yet he hesitated. "May I come again soon?" he asked, and held out his hand.
To his surprise Patty greeted his question with a laugh. "Do you really like politics so much?" she retorted; and fled lightly toward the staircase beyond the library.