“Why should you suppose that I mean anything of the sort?”
Pontycroft studied her with a frown. “You unconscionable little pickle! Do you mean that you would accept him?”
“I don't know,” she answered slowly, reflecting. “He's a very personable person. And he's a prince—which, of course, rather dazzles my democratic fancy. And I suppose he's well enough off not to be after a poor girl merely for her money. And—well—on the whole—don't you see?—well—perhaps a poor girl might go further and fare worse.”
She pointed her stammering conclusion by a drop of the eyelids and a tiny wriggle of the shoulders.
“In fact, when you said you would die a bachelor, you never thought you would live to be married,” Pontycroft commented, making a face, slightly wry, the intention of which wasn't clear. He felt about his pockets for his cigarette case, lighted a cigarette, and smoked half an inch of it in silence. “At any rate,” he went on, “here's news for your friends. And what—by the by—what about deathless Aphrodite? 'The only man you ever really cared for'—what becomes of that poor devil?”
A light kindled in Ruth's eyes; not an entirely friendly light; a light that seemed to threaten. But all she said was, “How do you know that that poor devil isn't Bertram Bertrandoni himself?”
The gesture with which Pontycroft flicked the ash from his cigarette proclaimed him a bird not to be caught with chaff.
“Gammon,” he said. “You'd never seen him.”
“Never seen him?” retorted Ruth, her face astonished and reproachful. “You are forgetting Venice. Why shouldn't I have lost my young affections to him that night at Venice? You haven't a notion how romantic it all was, with the moonlight and everything, and Lucilla quoting Byron, and then Astyanax, in a panama hat, dashing to our assistance like a knight out of a legend. Isn't it almost a matter of obligation for distressed females to fall in love with the knights who dash to their assistance.”
“Hruff,” growled Pontycroft, smoking, “why do you waste these pearls of sophistry on me?”