“If you were Elizabeth Wardwell, you wouldn’t ask any more; and if you were Vance Tregarvon, you couldn’t. So there you are.”
Again there was a smoke-beclouded silence, and into the thick of it Carfax launched a pointed query:
“Have you told Elizabeth anything at all about the girls’ school on the mountain—Highmount?”
“Oh, sure; and about the bewitching Miss Birrell, as well. I always tell Elizabeth everything; I haven’t sense enough not to.”
“And her comment?” asked the golden one half-absently.
“On Miss Birrell, you mean? To tell the brazen truth, I expected a wigging; not anything like a jealous outbreak, you understand—Elizabeth is miles above that—but some nicely worded, cool-lipped advice about not pitching the conventions out at the window just because I happen to be living a thousand miles from real civilization—Philadelphia civilization.”
“And you didn’t get it?”
“No, indeed. She didn’t say a word about Miss Birrell, specifically, but she wrote me a good cousinly letter in which she told me how glad she was that I needn’t deny myself all of the social mitigations, and urging me not to let my job on the Ocoee make a one-sided hermit of me. That letter came nearer to making me sentimental over her than anything else she has ever said or done. It did, for a fact.”
Carfax did not vote Aye or No on this. He appeared content to let the sentimental matter rest, since he went back to the business difficulties.
“About this last-resort tussle of yours, Vance, I see now why it is mighty necessary for you to make it win, and I wish you had a little better assurance that you are not up against a brace game; that Old Pisgah hasn’t stacked the cards on you.”