Fair glanced at him suspiciously from the corner of her eye.
“You needn’t laugh, my dear boy—it most certainly is. I don’t believe men care one little snip for your soul or—or your intellect.”
“Oh, but surely!” protested De Chartreuil politely.
“No, sir,” maintained the complete cynic, giving another abstracted hit at the ball. “Not a single, solitary one. Oh, bother—look where it went then! How many strokes have you had? Four? Four? I’ve had five, and look at the horrible thing now. What was I talking about? Oh, proposals! I don’t believe in international marriages, do you, Monsieur André?”
Monsieur André made a light and deprecating gesture. “I, Mademoiselle? But I have had so few!”
“I do think foreigners are horribly frivolous!” murmured Fair to the universe at large. “I’ve not had so many myself, but I can still think they’re a bad idea. You couldn’t possibly help thinking that they were pretty cold and calculating.”
“Could you not?” inquired one who had come very near being a cold calculator in a freezing voice. “I, for one, try to look more charitably on the pretty ladies who covet our poor coronets.”
Fair brushed this thrust aside with the obliviousness that made her strength and her weakness once the engine of her attention was racing along her one-track mind to the goal of her selection. Humour, satire, impertinence, or indignation were signals powerless to impede her progress when she was on her way; she rushed by them heedlessly, recklessly indifferent to anything short of a head-on collision.
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of the girls—who in the world wants a little old coronet! Of course they’re nice if you’re used to them,” she added hastily. “But it was the men that I was thinking of; you simply couldn’t be sure, not ever. You work, don’t you?”
“Alas, yes, Mademoiselle!” De Chartreuil abandoned resentment and stood leaning on his mallet, laughing down at this incorrigible and enchanting small barbarian.