"Not that I love her more than I do you," he added, fearing that he had been impolite. "But she strikes just that chord. She always makes me laugh. She is a sort of sun and warms one up—"
"The truth of the matter is that she strikes more chords than you will admit. She's just the one woman you ought to marry. If you'd make up your mind to love her, you'd soon find it surprisingly easy, and wonder why it never had occurred to you before." Betty thought she might as well begin at once.
He shook his head, and his handsome face flushed. It was not a frank face; he had lived too solitary and introspective a life for frankness; but he met Betty's eyes unflinchingly.
"She is not in the least the woman for me. She lacks beauty, and I could not stand a woman who was gay—and—and staccato all the time. It is delightful to meet, but would be insufferable to live with."
"What is your ideal type?"
He rose and raised her hand to his lips with all his old elaborate gallantry. "Oh, Betty Madison! Betty Madison!" he exclaimed. "That you should live to ask me such a question as that?"
"I'd like to box his ears if he did not mean that," thought Betty. "I particularly should dislike his attempting to blind me in that way."
And herself? She asked this question more than once as she rowed toward the northern end of the lake in the dawn, or in the heavier shadows at the close of the day. Could it last? And how long? And did he believe that it could last? Or was he, with the practical instinct of a man of the world, merely determined to quaff that fragrant mildly intoxicating wine of mental love-making, until the gods began to grin?
She had many moods, but when a woman is sure that her love is returned and is not denied the man's occasional presence, she cannot be unhappy for long, perhaps never wholly so. For while there is love there is hope, and while there is hope tears do not scald. Betty dared not let her thought turn for a moment to Mrs. North. Her will was strong enough to keep her mind on the high plane necessary to her self-respect. She would not even ask herself if he knew how low the sands had dropped in that unhappy life. The horizon of the future was thick with flying mist. Only his figure stood there, immovable, always.
"And it is remarkable how things do go on and on and on," she thought once. "They become a habit, then a commonplace. It is because they are so mixed up with the other details of life. Nothing stands out long by itself. The equilibrium is soon restored, and unless one deliberately starts it into prominence again, it stays in its proper place and swings with the rest."