"Mona, you do talk nonsense! I have scarcely had an offer of marriage in my life."
"I imagine that few women who really respect themselves have more than one, unless the men of their acquaintance—like the population of the British Isles—are 'mostly fools.'"
"Oh, they are all that. But I think what you say is very true. The first offer comes like a slap in the face, 'out of the everywhere.' Who could have foreseen it? But after that one gets to know when there is electricity in the air, don't you think so?"
"I suppose so. But the experience is not much in my line. Sensible men are rather apt to think me a guter Kamerad, and one weak-minded young curate asked me to share two hundred a year with him—his 'revenue' he called it, by the way. Behold the extent of my dominion over the other sex! I sometimes think," she added gloomily, "it is commensurate with the extent to which I have attained the ideal of womanhood!"
"Mona! If the sons of God were to take unto themselves wives of the daughters of men, we should hear a different tale. As things are, I am glad you are not a man's woman. You are a woman's woman, which is infinitely better. If you could be turned into a man to-morrow, half the girls of your acquaintance would marry you. I know I would, for one."
"You are my oldest friend, Doris," said Mona gratefully. "The others like me because I am moody and mysterious, and occasionally motherly. Women always fall in love with the Unknown."
"How could they marry men if it were otherwise?" said Doris, but she did not in the least mean it for wit.
"You miserable old cynic! I am going to introduce you to-day—I say advisedly introduce you—to a man who will convert even Doris Colquhoun to a love of his sex. He met me at the station last night, but I suppose you were too much taken up with your protégées to notice him."
"I caught a glimpse of white hair and an old-world bow. One can't judge of faces in the glaring light and black shadows of a railway station at night."
"That's true. Everybody looks like an amateur photograph taken indoors. But you shall see Mr Reynolds to-day. He promised to come in. Present company excepted, I don't know that I love any one in the world as I do him—unless it be Sir Douglas Munro."