"Perhaps. I don't remember." She turned to Gerty, looking down upon her with a tenderness that suffused her face with colour. "What was it that you told me, dearest?"
"What did I tell you?" repeated Gerty, still clasping Laura's hand. "Oh, it must have been that he agrees with some dreadful person who said that poetry was the insanity of prose."
Laura laughed as she glanced back at him, and he contrasted her deep contralto notes with Gerty's flute-like soprano.
"Well, he may not be right, but he is with the majority," she said.
Her indifference piqued him into the spirit of opposition, and he felt an immediate impulse to compel her reluctant interest—to arouse her admiration of the very qualities she now disdained.
"Well, I take my poetry where I find it," he rejoined, "and that's mostly in life and not in books."
From the quick turn of her head, the instant's lifting of her emotional reserve, he saw that the words had arrested her imagination—that for the first time since her entrance she had really taken in the fact of his existence as an individual.
"Then you are not with the majority, but you are right!" she exclaimed.
"Is it not possible to be both?" he asked, pleased almost more than he would admit by the quickening of her attention.
"I think not," she answered seriously, "don't you?"