Nina Jaffray raised a hand in protest.
“Don’t, Nellie, it’s no joke, I can tell you. I’m not a nice little thing any longer, and I know it. I’m a hoydenish, hard-riding, loud-spoken vixen, and that’s the truth. I wish I was a ‘nice little thing’ as you call it, like Jane Loring for instance, with illusions and hopes and a proclivity for virtue. I’m not. I like the talk of men——”
“That’s not unnatural—so do I.”
“I mean the talk of men among men. They interest me, more what they say than what they are. They’re genuine, somehow. You can get the worst and the best of them at a sitting. One can’t do that with women. Most of us are forever purring and pawing and my-dearing one another when we know that what we want to do is to spit and claw. I like the easy ways of men—collectively, Nellie, not individually, and I’ve come and gone among them because it seemed the most natural thing in the world to do. I’ve made a mistake. I know it now. When a girl gets to be ‘a good fellow’ she does it at the expense either of her femininity or her morals. And men make the distinction without difficulty. I’m ‘a good fellow,’” she said scornfully, “and I’m decent. Men know it, but they know, too, that I have no individual appeal. Why only last week at the Breakfast the Sackett boy clapped me on the back and called me ‘a jolly fine chap.’ I put him down, I can tell you. I’d rather he’d called me anything—anything—even something dreadful—if it had only been feminine.”
She flicked her cigarette into the fire and dropped into a chair.
Mrs. Pennington laughed.
“All this is very unmanly of you, Nina.”
“Oh, I’m not joking. You’re like the others. Just because I’ve ridden through life with a light hand, you think I’m in no danger of a cropper. Well, I am. I’ve had too light a hand, and I’m out in the back-stretch with a winded horse. You didn’t make that mistake, Nellie. Why couldn’t you have warned me?”
Mrs. Pennington held off the embroidery frame at arm’s length and examined it with interest.
“You didn’t ask me to, Nina,” she replied quietly.