But it was niggardly to grudge something that lay within her power to give. Or wasn’t it?... Chastity—the girl in white armour.... To give so easily, though—she remembered Doctor Steele. And the gloomy little boy had thirsted for that one kiss; too inarticulate to ask for it; too comic, in his owl’s spectacles and low collar and vertical crest of hair, to make a silently romantic plea, he just sat on the pile of logs looking up at her in dazed sickly reverie, as she came towards him along the misty blue road that meandered among the fir trees behind the town. She understood that by lightly dropping her lips on to his, there, in that scene, at that hour, she could give him an exquisite moment to carry through the sentimental years into manhood. Why not, then? The girl who withholds such chance gifts in her power, for the sake of what was called her bloom, what was she, after all, but a miser?
Deb’s kiss was just an impulse of almsgiving. She did not shatter the boy’s ecstasy by speech. Hardly pausing in her walk, she bent ... he had a vision of her serious mouth and warmly glowing eyes ... and she went swiftly on.
Frau Huldah von Sittart, who witnessed the idyll and reported on it, could not have been expected to interpret its psychology correctly. But to Richard, Deb tried to explain.... It was intolerable that he should suppose she enjoyed kissing scrubby little schoolboys.
He listened, brows knitted severely: “But, my dear kid, that sort of philanthropy is rather dangerous, isn’t it, where men in general are concerned?”
“It’s just whether one is to be generous or stingy—oh, don’t you see? ... to give what matters so little to me, and so tremendously much to them——”
“Make a habit of it, you’ll end by giving what means so much to you and so precious little to them.”
Richard’s wisdom was a mere accident of repartee; and Deb did not smile; she very rarely smiled; but her voice at all times held a certain clear joyousness that was in startling contrast to her tired little face; her voice was a child, years younger than her lips or her eyes. So that Richard could only dimly suspect her of hidden laughter as she said: “I esteem your judgment, but—you’re rather precocious, aren’t you?”
“Good Lord, no!” he shouted, appalled. “I’m sensible. You can’t walk about dropping kisses.”
“Dropping magic,” she corrected him gravely. “And if I’m not the poorer, and am quite sure they will be the richer....” She tilted her head defiantly: “Richard, I’d rather be royal than—good!”