“Dear me,” she said presently, “we have to go and I’ve talked of nothing but my own affairs. In my solitude down here I’ve grown a shameless egotist.”
As if she had been ever anything else, the unconscious soul!
“But to be with one of my own sex—some one linked with the past, too, is extenuation. There’s so much a woman can’t talk of with men, they have such different ways of seeing things, and let her love her men folk never so dearly, if there’s none of her own sex around, a woman’s lonesome, Alexina.”
“Yes,” said Alexina, “she is.” But she said it absently, for she was conscious of King William’s gaze being upon her. She looked up laughing, yet a little confused, for his look was warm.
He slipped along the railing, leaving Mrs. Garnier and the minister chatting. In this blue serge suit and straw hat he looked very like the King William of long ago, dark, keen and impatient.
“What do you think of it, Aden?” he asked.
“I like it,” said Alexina. “Somehow as soon as you are in a thing the scene changes to out of doors. It used to be Indians on the common, or Crusoe in the yard, back there in Louisville.”
“You began by saying you liked it,” he reminded her. Did he think to tease? His eyes were naughty. Here was a zest; this was no Georgy.
“And I do,” she said, standing to it. “I do like it.”