“A smart girl, a girl who knew more about men than Rosalind, would have had Stanwick Carlton absolutely crazy about her. He was for a long time, and then she was just too easy, too accessible. I tried to warn her about it but she laughed at me. She said they were going to be married and live happily ever after. You know what happened.”
“What happened?”
“After a while he got tired of it. She was always there, always adoring him, always ready to obey his slightest wish. She wouldn’t even look at any other man or let any other man look at her. She didn’t have sense enough to ever play hard-to-get.”
“And so Minerva entered the scene?”
“That’s right — Minerva. She was shrewd and fast and hot. I’m not kidding. I know what I’m talking about. One woman can tell a lot about another.”
“All right, she’d played around. So what?”
“She came to Colorado. She sized up the situation in an instant and she started playing hard-to-get.”
“So Stanwick Carlton immediately married her?”
“Don’t be silly, it wasn’t that way at all. He became interested in her, and she simply tilted her chin, looked over her shoulder at him and moved away. He had to take that challenge. He wanted to show her, I guess, that he could dent her armour if he wanted to, then he was going back to Rosalind. The first thing he knew, he was completely snared and there was a run-away marriage. I don’t think the poor chap knew what really had happened to him until he woke up, safely married, after what the papers called a whirlwind courtship. A whirlwind courtship!” she added scornfully. “I’ll say it was. Only he wasn’t the one who did the whirlwinding.”
“Go on,” I said.