"The right man to sweep you off your feet."
"I knew you were going to say that. No, you're wrong. I'm not essentially a man's woman, Mrs. Blair. Sex isn't even as big a part of my life as it is of most women's. I can't flirt. I haven't an ounce of coquetry in me. I think I almost hate—"
"You mean you hate what your experience has been. The right man for you, dear, a man with enough of the materialist to hold you in check and enough of youth and vision and ideals to soar with you. No, no, you don't hate him, Lilly."
"Why—why—who?"
"Oh, I've seen it flash between the two of you. I've watched it being silently born. Lilly child, look at me!"
"Why, Mrs. Blair! Why—Mrs. Blair! I've never seen him outside of office hours in my life. I never laid eyes on him until he walked in that night from Chicago. Why, I—I'm a married woman! He's younger—than I—a year! He knows there is Zoe. He sent her up a little hobbyhorse from the property room. Why, Mrs. Blair—of course if you look at me like—that—"
She was suddenly in the older woman's arms, a passionate, a peony red flooding her face and waving down her words. She was all for further resistance, but her denial had taken on an archness for which she somehow blushed.
Besides, it was suddenly delicious to huddle there, tingling in the darkness.
CHAPTER VI
There were a quality of voice, of eye, and a fine, upstanding rush of sooty black hair which he tried to japan down with a pair of swift military brushes, in the way of woman's safest judgment of Bruce Visigoth.