"How do I know?" she took up the question in a voice which even in her lightest moments was not without a quality of impassioned earnestness. "The one infallible way of knowing anything is to know it without really knowing how or why one knows. My intuitions, you see, are my deeper wisdom."
"And what do your intuitions have to say in regard to me?"
"Only," she responded, smiling, "that it would be dangerous for us to attempt an acquaintance that should last forever."
"Dangerous!" the word excited his imagination and he felt the sting of it in his blood. "What harm do you think would come of it?"
"The harm that always comes of the association between opposites," she answered quickly, and the laughter, he was prompt to notice, had died from her voice, "the harm of endless disagreements, of lost illusions."
"Why should our illusions, if we were so fortunate as to have them, inevitably be lost?" he asked, provoked into an assurance of his interest by the serene disinclination she displayed.
"Because they invariably are if they are illusions?" she responded, "and you and I could never be absolute realities to each other, since to reach the reality in a person one must not only apprehend but comprehend as well. I doubt if there can be any permanent friendship between people who are totally unlike."
Half angrily he swung the stick he carried at his side. "Then what becomes of the attraction of opposites?" he insisted.
"A catastrophe usually," she returned.
Her composed indifference irritated him more than he was willing to admit even to himself. Never in his recollection had he encountered a woman who showed so marked a disinclination for his society; and the wonder of her avoidance challenged him into the exercise of the personal magnetism he had always found so invincible in its attraction. Had she met his advances with unaffected feminine eagerness, he would have parted, probably, from her at the next corner, but her polite indifference kept him, though indignant, still at her side. Of adulation he was weary, but a positive aversion promised a new and exhilarating experience of life.