Miss Starbruck shuddered, but felt that the conversation had gone out of her depth, and made no reply. Hermia looked at Quintard with a feeling of unconscious pride. Until he finished speaking, she did not realize how she would hate to have him beaten.
Cryder rose and began walking up and down the room. “When you argue,” he said fretfully, “I always feel as if you were hammering me about my ears. You have such a way of pounding through a discussion! One never knows until the next day whether you are right or whether you have simply overwhelmed one by the force of your vitality. Personally, however, I do not agree with you, and for the same reason that I would never marry; I dislike responsibilities.”
Quintard gave him a glance of contempt, under which Hermia shrank as if a lash had cut her shoulders; but before he could reply Helen rushed to the front. “And all this discussion has come out of my poor little bid for sympathy and advice!” she cried. “You have frightened me to death! I am afraid of the very word matrimony with all your analysis and philosophy. To me it was a simple proposition: ‘Marry and chaperon; don’t marry, and be chaperoned.’ Now I feel that, if a man proposes to me, I must read Darwin and Spencer before I answer. I refuse to listen to another word. Mrs. Dykman, I am going home; let me drive you over.”
They all went in a few moments, and Hermia was left alone with her reflections.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
TWO HISTORIES ARE ALMOST FINISHED.
Hermia saw a great deal of Quintard. They walked together, they rode together, and circumstances frequently forced them into each other’s society for hours at a time. She liked him more with every interview, but she did not feel a throb of love for him. The snow on her nature’s volcano was deep as the ashes which buried Pompeii.
He had many opportunities to put his wearing qualities to the test. Once they met at a fashionable winter rendezvous in the country. The other women were of the Helen Simms type; the rest of the men belonged to the Winston brotherhood. For the greater part of four days Hermia and Quintard devoted themselves exclusively to each other. When they were not riding across the country or rambling through the windy woods, they sat in the library and told stories by the fire.
One day they had wandered far into the woods and come upon a hemlock glen, down one side of which tumbled melting snow over great jutting rocks that sprang from the mountain side. Quintard and Hermia climbed to a ledge that overhung one of the rocky platforms and sat down. About and above them rose the forest, but the wind was quiet; there was no sound but the dull roar of the cataract. A more romantic spot was not in America, but Quintard could not have been more matter-of-fact had he been in a street-car. He had never betrayed any feeling he may have had for her by a flash of his eye. He discussed with her subjects dangerous and tender, but always with the cold control of the impersonal analyst.