“It was I who mentioned it, I believe,” she corrected him calmly.
There was obvious meaning in her insistence. He looked up at her in vague surprise, the while he mentally retraced the steps by which the conversation had reached this point. There was undoubtedly a very knowing expression in her eyes. Clearly she had meant to associate Vestalia with what she described as his position—the position which she deemed so unusual; it was equally plain that she desired him to understand that she did so. It was impossible that she should know anything of what had happened. He searched his memory, and made sure that no personal hint of any sort had drifted into that rambling discourse of his in the Assyrian corridors, which the Americans had more or less overheard. What then was she talking about?
Ah, what indeed? She lay back in her chair, and met his gaze of bewildered interrogation with a fine show of composure. She looked at him tranquilly through lazy, halfclosed eyelids. His suspicions discerned beneath the passive surface of this regard animated under-currents of ironical amusement and triumph. There was nothing overt upon which he could found the challenge to an explanation, but as he continued to scrutinise her, he could fancy that her whole presence radiated the suggestion of repressed glee. Whatever the mystery might be, she was extracting great delight from her possession of a clue to it.
“Yes, it was you who mentioned my position,” he remarked, groping lamely for some sure footing on which to redress his disadvantage. “I don’t know that! quite follow you; wherein do you find my position, as you term it, so exceptional?
“You yourself have boasted that it couldn’t be matched in all history,” she reminded him. Her tone was casual enough, but the sense of sport began to gleam unmistakably in her eyes.
“Now you argue in a circle,” he remonstrated, with a shade of professional acerbity in his voice. “Your remark came before mine, and hence cannot possibly have been based upon my subsequent comment. If I may be permitted the observation, they seem to teach logic but indifferently in the United States.”
“Oh, that is why we came here,” retorted the girl, with ostentatious naïveté. The conceit pleased her so much that she bent forward, and assumed the manner of one communicating an important fact. “That is why I had my father make you an offer at once. You know, most professors, and teachers, and so on, are so hard to understand. But the moment I laid eyes on you I said, ‘There’s a man that I can see through as if he were plate-glass; I can read him like a book.’ And, of course, that must be the most valuable of all qualities in an instructor.”
“So I am entirely transparent, am I? I present no secrets to your gaze?” Mosscrop spoke like one in whom pique and a sense of the comical struggled for mastery. “Then I cannot do better than beg you to tell me some things about myself. Why, for example, do I sit here patiently and submit to be laughed at, heckled, satirised, and generally bully-ragged by a young lady, whose title to do these things is not in the least apparent to me?”
“Why, don’t you remember? You’re waiting for papa.”
“And incidentally providing his offspring, in the interim, with much harmless and chaste entertainment,” put in Mosscrop, drily. “I am charmed to have diverted you so successfully. It occurs to me, since you are so readily amused, that you must have been wofully bored before I made my happy appearance.”