Patience wanted to tear her hair. It was with an effort that she kept her face from convulsing with disgust. She caught sight of the young man’s intellectual brow, and, without any premonitory consciousness, laughed aloud. Mr. Peele smiled back with the pleasure of appreciated wit, and resumed his cigar.
“Bev isn’t such a fool as he looks,” remarked Hal, airily. “Just have patience with him. We all have our little failings.”
Patience sat as if turned to clay. She could not talk. All her natural animation had deserted her. She wished they would go and leave her alone. But Hal pulled off her riding gloves, and made herself comfortable on the sofa. As she rattled on, Patience noticed how beautiful her nails were. She turned her own hands over so that the palms lay upward.
“Never mind,” said young Peele, in a low tone. “They’re much prettier.”
“What’s that?” cried Hal. “What are you blushing about, Patience? How lovely it is to blush like that. I’ve forgotten how—and I’m only twenty-two. There’s tragedy for you. It’s not that I’ve had so many compliments about my beauty, nor yet about my winning ways,—which are my strong point,—but I found so much to blush about when I was first launched upon this wicked world that I exhausted my capacity. And Bev always did tell such naughty stories—” She paused abruptly. “Dear me! perhaps I’ve made a bad break, and prejudiced you against my brother; and I want you to be good friends so that we can have jolly times together. Perhaps you have an ideal man—a sort of Sir Galahad. I haven’t sounded you yet.”
“Sir Galahad is not my ideal,” said Patience, with the quick scorn of the woman who is born with intuitive knowledge of man. “I could not find anything interesting in an elongated male infant.”
“Oh, how lovely!” cried Hal. “Give me the man of the world every time. I tell you, you appreciate the difference when you have to entertain ’em. And the elongated infant, as you put it, never understands a woman, and she has no use for that species whatever. He doesn’t even want to understand her, and a woman resents that as a personal insult. The bad ones hurt sometimes, but they’re interesting; and when you learn how to manage them it’s plain sailing enough. Mrs. Laurence Gibbs—a friend of mamma’s, awfully good, goes in for charity and all that sort of thing—said the other day that at the rate women were developing and advancing, the standard of men morally would have to be raised. But I said ‘Not much!’ that the development of woman meant that women were becoming more clever, not merely bright and intellectual, and that clever women would demand cleverness and fascination in man above all else; and that Sir Galahads were not that sort. It’s experience that makes a man interesting to us women,—they represent all we’d like to be and don’t dare. If they were like ourselves—if they didn’t excite our imaginations—we wouldn’t care a hang for them. Mrs. Gibbs was horrified, of course, and told me I didn’t know what I was talking about. But I said I guessed it was the other way. I’m not clever—not by a long sight,—and if I can’t stand a prig I know a clever woman can’t and won’t.”
“I’m so glad I’m not a prig,” murmured Mr. Peele.
“Oh, you’re a real devil. If you were clever now, you’d have to be shut up to protect society; but as it is, you just go on your good looks, so you’re not as dangerous as some.”
She rattled on, not giving the others a chance for more than a stray remark. Patience, listening with deep curiosity to this new philosophy, became aware of an increasing desire to turn her eyes to the man that had so bitterly disappointed her. A direct potent force seemed to emanate from him. It was her first experience of man’s magnetism, but she knew that he possessed it to a remarkable degree. When he finally shot out an insignificant remark she felt, in the excuse it gave her to turn to him, a sensation of positive relief. He was leaning back in his chair, in the easy attitude of a man that has been too accustomed to luxury all his life to look uncomfortable in any circumstances. With his picturesque garb, his noble, beautiful face, his subtle air of elegance and distinction, he looked the ideal hero of girlhood’s dreams. Patience wondered what Nature had been about, then recalled the many tricks of that capricious dame made famous in history, the round innocent faces of the worst boys in the Loyal Legion class, the saintly physiognomy of a Mariaville minister who had recently fallen from grace.