“Do you mind telling me what you mean to do with the girl?”
“No,” said Stirling. “I want to keep her with me just as long as she’s willing to stay; but I suppose I can stand it if she marries somebody by and by.”
“That,” said the lady, “is just the point. You would naturally prefer him to be an eligible person. Now, if you let me have her for a while I could promise that she would meet nobody who didn’t answer that description.”
Stirling laughed. He had suspected her intention all along, and surmised that her offer was prompted partly by good-nature and partly by a recognition of the fact that the presence of a young woman of considerable wealth, who was beautiful as well as otherwise gifted, would increase the popularity of the receptions over which she was fond of presiding.
“I’m not quite sure her views and yours would coincide,” he said. “Anyway, she has been in New York before—and in England, for that matter.”
Mrs. Frisingham adroitly shifted her point of attack, and it almost appeared, though Stirling could not tell how, that she had heard of the camp-packer.
“Don’t you think there’s a certain danger of her going through the wood and choosing the crooked stick after all?” she asked.
Stirling smiled. “I don’t know that you could call New York or London a wood. A hothouse would be nearer it,” he said with an air of reflection. “Still, to fall in with the simile, there are no doubt plenty of sticks in both places, just as there are right here in this city. In fact,” and his eyes twinkled suspiciously, “I’m not quite sure that isn’t an excellent name for them. Quite a few are nicely varnished, and in a general way they’ve hall-marked gold or silver tops. The hallmark, however, guarantees only the trimmings, and from one or two specimens that I’ve come across I’ve a suspicion that in some cases the timber’s rotten. When you choose a stick you want a sound one—one that you can lean on when you face a hill, and I guess that’s a thing my girl will have to do now and then.”
His tone had grown a trifle graver as he went on, but his companion waited, feeling that he had a little more to say, and that he might offer her a hint of some kind, as, in fact, he presently did.
“The sound sticks don’t grow in stove-warmed houses, but out in the wind and sun,” he said.