"Why, thank you!"
"--Like many of the older houses I ran across in searching it out----"
Alice seemed unable to rise quite above her embarrassment. "I can hardly believe you are not making fun of me. What ridiculous quests in St. Louis and in Piedmont! Surely there must have been incidents of more importance than these in a three-weeks' trip."
He ignored her comment. "I stood a long time staring at your father's house, and wishing I might have been born in that little old cottage just across the street from where that rich little girl of sixteen lived. I would rather have known you then than lived all I have lived since you were born there."
Alice returned his look with control of every feature. "I did not live there till I was sixteen, if you mean the old home. And if you had been born just across the street you would have had no absurd idea about that little girl in your head. Little girls are not usually interested in little boys across the street. Little boys born thousands of miles away have better chances, I think, of knowing them. And it is better so--for they, at least, don't know what absurd, selfish little things girls across the street are."
"That is all wrong----"
"It is not," declared Alice pointedly.
But the force of everything she said was swept away by his manner. "Only give me the same street and the meanest house in it!" His intensity would not be answered. "I would have taken the chances of winning."
"What confidence!"
"And I'd have done it or torn the house down."