Mollie gave her shoulders a petulant shrug.
“Brown is that little man in the big coat,” she said, “the one who went away when you came. I wish he would stay away. I can't bear him,” with delightful candor.
“But why?” persisted Gowan, casting a glance at the side of the room where Dolly stood talking to her lover. “Is it because his coat is so big, or because he is so little, that he is so objectionable? To be at once moral and instructive, Mollie, a man is not to be judged by his coat.”
“I know that,” returned Mollie, her unconscious innocence asserting itself; “it is n't that. You couldn't be as disagreeable as he is if you were dressed in rags.”
Gowan turned quickly to look at her, forgetting even Dolly for the instant,—but she was quite in earnest, and met his questioning eyes with the most pathetic ignorance of having said anything extraordinary. Indeed, her faith in what she had said was so patent that he found it impossible to answer her with a light or jesting speech.
“It is n't that,” she went on, pulling at a glossy green leaf on her bouquet. “If he did n't—if he would n't—if he didn't keep saying things—”
“What sort of things?” asked Gowan, to help her out of her dilemma.
“I—don't know,” was the shy reply. “Stupid things.”
“Stupid things!” he repeated. “Poor Brown!” and his eyes wandered to Dolly again.
But it would not have been natural if he had not been attracted by Mollie, after all, and in the course of time in a measure consoled by her. She was so glad to be protected from the advances of the much despised Brown, that he found it rather pleasant than otherwise to constitute himself her body-guard,—to talk to her as they sat, and to be her partner in the stray dances which accidentally enlivened the evening entertainment. She danced well, too, he discovered, and with such evident enjoyment of her own smooth, swaying movements as was quite magnetic, and made him half reluctant to release her when their first waltz was ended, and she stopped all aflush with new bloom.