"Wouldn't you—I mean, don't you like giving up little things for people you rather love?" she ventured.
"Heaven forbid! When I am finally guilty, O Shrimpet, of offering up my all in a very ecstasy of selfishness, it shall be to the one person—not to people, but to the one person—who is big enough to warrant the wickedness of self-obliteration. But to please myself in the untidy fashion peculiar to you and Ann, all day long and day after day complacently giving up things in driblets to people who don't count—me, for instance!—that is self-indulgence carried to a degree which I really cannot condone!"
After which severe and lofty denunciation, Patricia absorbed the last of the caramels; sprang down from her perch on the schoolroom desk; and casually asked Hetty to do an errand for her at the far end of the town, through a mile and a half of driving rain. Not seeing the twinkle concealed by Patricia's veiling lashes, Hetty indignantly refused; remarking, as the other had intended she should: "I'd have gone for you with pleasure if you hadn't said all that just now...."
Hetty was the youngest of the trio; only fourteen; and the sole offspring of a late marriage between Shane O'Neill and Mary Lynton, widower and widow, with a daughter apiece to bring along as contribution to the new household. Patricia was four at the time; and staid little Ann Lynton two and three quarters. Dr. O'Neill died a few years later, leaving his wife and the three girls a roomy comfortable house with a large garden in Sydenham, where his practice had been; and a very adequate income for their needs.
When Patricia was twenty, she met Dacres Upton.
She met him while on a winter holiday in Switzerland, at Les Avants. He beat her in the Mixed Singles Toboggan Race. And then refused to give up the prize to her, when a sociable and tactless sports' secretary suggested it were not unbecoming on his part to do so.
"What do you suppose she'd do with a prize she hadn't won?" enquired Upton.
"It was a very close finish. Miss O'Neill put up a magnificent fight."
"She did," the young man assented unemotionally.
"Well then," with a genial beam, "we agree that chivalry dictates——"