“That fellow Crowdie’s a brute!” he exclaimed, with energy.
“Well—I don’t like him, you know. But was it so very bad? Tell me, Jack—you’re my natural protector.” She laughed happily. “It’s your business to tell me what’s right and what’s wrong. Was it so very bad of him to kiss my glove after he’d buttoned it? I almost boxed his ears at the time—I was so angry! But I want to be fair. Was it exactly—wrong? I wish you’d tell me.”
“Wrong? No; it wasn’t exactly wrong.” Ralston paused thoughtfully. “Kissing women’s hands is one of those relative things,” he continued. “It’s right in one part of the world, it’s indifferent in another, and it’s positively the wrong thing to do somewhere else—whatever it’s meant to mean. We don’t do that sort of thing much over here. As he did it, I suppose it was simply the wrong thing to do. At least, I want to suppose so, but I can’t. The man’s half in love with you, you know.”
“Oh, nonsense, Jack! It’s only because we dislike him so. If ever a man was in love with his wife, he is.”
“Yes, I know,” answered Ralston, in the same thoughtful tone. “That’s quite true. But it doesn’t prevent him from being half in love with lots of other women at the same time. It’s not the same thing. Oh, yes! he loves Hester. She’s quite mad about him, of course. We all know that, in the family. But Crowdie’s peculiar—and it’s not a nice peculiarity, either. One sees it in his manner somehow, and in his eyes. I can’t exactly explain it to you. He admires every woman who’s beautiful, and it’s a little more than admiration. He has a way with him which we men don’t like. And when he does such things as he did to-day there’s always a suggestion of something disagreeable in his way of doing them, so that if they’re not positively wrong, they’re not positively innocent. They’re on the ragged edge between the two, as Frank Miner says.”
“I think it’s more in the way he looks at one than in anything else,” said Katharine. “He has such a horrid mouth! But it’s absurd to say that he’s in love with me, Jack.”
“Oh, no, it’s not! That night at aunt Maggie’s, when he sang, you know—it was for you and nobody else. What a queer evening that was, by the way! There were five of us men there, all in love with you in one way or another.”
“Jack! It’s positively ridiculous! The idea of such a thing!”
“Not at all. There was Ham, in the first place. You admit that he’s one, don’t you?”
“I suppose I must, since he proposed,” answered Katharine, reluctantly, and turning her face away.