“Wasn’t it? But he was so genial about it that I couldn’t take offense.”
“What did he mean by not being ‘too good’?” she questioned gravely.
“I didn’t know at the time, but I’ve found out since. I grew up with a good many old-fashioned notions, I guess, and I’m not sure that I haven’t got some of them yet. One of them that I’ve been trying to modify was the belief that a man might set up his own standards and live by them.”
“I have that same belief now,” asserted the daughter of the luxuries. “Why are you trying to modify it? Isn’t it reasonable?”
“It is reasonable enough, and it is right and proper that you should have it. It is your woman’s privilege to believe the best of everything. But the man has to take the world as he finds it.” Thus far he was merely skirting judiciously upon the safer edges of the generalizations. But the next moment he found himself yielding to the temptation which so easily besets the average man—to confide in a woman. “I’ll tell you, Virginia; I’ve done things in the past year that I would never have dreamed of doing in my callow days; things that would make my father gasp if he knew about them.”
“Wicked things?” she suggested.
“There was a time when I should have called them wicked, without a shadow of doubt. But that was before I had come to realize that business—all kinds of business—is a sort of war; a fight in which, if you don’t ‘get’ the other fellow, he’ll get you.”
“You are all wrong—hideously wrong!” she broke out in a sudden passion of vehemence. “I don’t mean in the statement of fact—that is only too true. But in your own attitude. It is the first of the downward steps: if you take that step deliberately, there is no reason why you should stop at anything!”
There was only soft starlight on the sheltered porch, and David could smile in safety. The little outburst of generous indignation carried him swiftly back to the childhood days, reviving his memory picture of a hot-hearted little girl whose anger had always flamed fiercely at any spectacle of wrong or oppression, and whose defending of stray kittens and homeless dogs had more than once made him fight in blind boyish rage—not for the dogs and kittens, but for her.
“You haven’t changed much, inside, since we were babies together, and I’m glad of it,” he said, after the momentary pause ushered in by the indignant protest. “It is good of you not to make me always think of you as the grown-up Miss Virginia—the little sister of the luxuries.”