"Can't you?" he asked earnestly, leaning a little towards her, his clean-cut face looking thinner and sharper in the dim light. "We could be very happy."
"There are so many things in the way," Gay said. "It isn't because I don't care for you—you know that. There's Frank, you see, he's so helpless even as it is, and without me he'd go all to bits."
"He could live with us," suggested Chris, eager to overcome such a trifling difficulty as this seemed.
"I don't want to marry anybody for ever so long, Chris. Can't you understand that I want to have a good time—be a girl as long as I can?" she said a little piteously. "And Trotting is my last, or, rather, my new love."
"Well, think it over, and start prejudiced in my favour if you can," said Chris, striving hard to cover up his wound.
Never show you're hit, was a maxim of his, and he lived up to it now, though his disappointment was the keenest he had ever known. It is always the man whose daring is most determined in the hunting field, whose nerve is unshaken by all the obstacles to be met with over a stiff steeplechase course, rising unruffled from a rattling fall, who is the most gentle in all the occasions of life, and Chris was gentle now.
"But I've got a chance," he said, with more assurance than he felt; "while there's life there's hope, you know, and a race is never lost till it's won—though even then there may be an objection," he added whimsically.
Carlton Mackrell, who came at that moment to claim her for his dance, and knew every change in Gay's expression, knew at once that Chris had just asked her in vain the question that he himself, up to now, had not done, for the simple reason that she would not let him.
A man loses his head, is completely bouleversé, when a woman stalks him, and ten to one, in sheer nervousness he gives her the desired opportunity, but with the unwilling woman, every faculty comes into play to defeat the lover's purpose. She develops strategic powers of a high order, is an adept at keeping others round her, in never being really alone with him, and while it is warming, exciting work for the girl, it is an intensely irritating experience for the man. The brute crashes straight through all obstacles to his end; a chivalrous gentleman bides his time, as Carlton bided his, and in waiting, loses his chance more often than not.