“So you furnish the polish, and he the honesty and industry? Is that it?”
The words were distinctly unpleasant, and Horace looked up swiftly to the speaker’s face, feeling that his own was flushed. But Miss Kate was smiling at him, with a quizzical light dancing in her eyes, and this reassured him on the instant. Evidently she felt herself on easy terms with him, and this was merely a bit of playful chaff.
“We don’t put it quite in that way,” he said, with an answering laugh. “It would be rather egotistical, on both sides.”
“Nowadays everybody resents that imputation as if it were a cardinal sin. There was a time when self-esteem was taken for granted. I suppose it went out with chain-armor and farthingales.” She spoke in a musing tone, and added after a tiny pause, “That must have been a happy time, at least for those who wore the armor and the brocades.”
Horace leaped with avidity at the opening. “Those were the days of romance,” he said, with an effort at the cooing effect in his voice. “Perhaps they were not so altogether lovely as our fancy paints them; but, all the same, it is very sweet to have the fancy. Whether it be historically true or not, those who possess it are rich in their own mind’s right. They can always escape from the grimy and commercial conditions of this present work-a-day life. All one’s finer senses can feed, for example, on a glowing account of an old-time tournament—with the sun shining on the armor and burnished shields, and the waving plumes and iron-clad horses and the heralds in tabards, and the rows of fair ladies clustered about the throne—as it is impossible to do on the report of a meeting of a board of directors, even when they declare you an exceptionally large dividend.”
The young man kept a close watch upon this flow of words as it proceeded, and felt satisfied with it. The young woman seemed to like it too, for she had sunk back into her chair with an added air of ease, and looked at him now with what he took to be a more sympathetic glance, as she made answer:
“Why, you are positively romantic, Mr. Boyce!”
“Me? My dear Miss Minster, I am the most sentimental person alive,” Horace protested gayly.
“Don’t you find that it interferes with your profession?” she asked, with that sparkle of banter in her dark eyes which he began to find so delicious. “I thought lawyers had to eschew sentiment. Or perhaps you supply that, too, in this famous partnership of yours!”
Horace laughed with pleasure. “Would you like me the less if I admitted it?” he queried.