"But perhaps the custom of the place was different?"
"No, sir, it was not custom that kept her," replied Banks, in a bitterness that scorned deception, "for she went with others. It was the same thing about dancing, too, for if I asked her to dance, she would always declare that she didn't have the strength to use her fan, and the minute after I went away, I'd see her floating round the ball-room in somebody else's arms. Once I did get her to start, but she left off after the first round, because, she said, we could not keep in step. And yet I'd kept in step with her ever since we went on roller skates together."
He broke off for an instant, knocked the cold ashes out of his pipe, and plucking a long blade of grass, began chewing it nervously as he talked.
"And yet if you could only have seen her when she came down to the ball-room in her white organdie and blue ribbons," he exclaimed presently, in an agony of recollection.
"Well, I'm rather glad on the whole that I didn't," rejoined Ordway.
"You'd have fallen in love with her if you had—you couldn't have helped it."
"Then, thank heaven, I escaped the test. It's a pretty enough pickle as it is now."
"I could have stood it all," said Banks, "if it hadn't been for the other man. She might have pulled every single strand of my hair out if she'd wanted to, and I'd have grit my teeth and pretended that I liked it. I didn't care how badly she treated me. What hurt me was how well she treated the other man."
"Did she meet him for the first time last summer?" asked Ordway.
"Oh no, she's known him ever since she went North in the spring—but it's worse now than it's ever been and, upon my word, she doesn't seem to have eyes or ears for anybody else."