“Well, I guess in that matter we’re right. Over here it’s a leap in the dark.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she again made answer. She had folded her fan; she stretched out her arm mechanically and plucked a sprig of azalea.
“I guess it doesn’t signify after all,” Jackson however proceeded. “Don’t you know they say that love’s blind at the best?” His keen young face was bent upon hers; his thumbs were in the pockets of his trousers; he smiled with a slight strain, showing his fine teeth. She said nothing, only pulling her azalea to pieces. She was usually so quiet that this small movement was striking.
“This is the first time I’ve seen you in the least without a lot of people,” he went on.
“Yes, it’s very tiresome.”
“I’ve been sick of it. I didn’t want even to come here to-night.”
She hadn’t met his eyes, though she knew they were seeking her own. But now she looked at him straight. She had never objected to his appearance, and in this respect had no repugnance to surmount. She liked a man to be tall and handsome, and Jackson Lemon was neither; but when she was sixteen, and as tall herself as she was to be at twenty, she had been in love—for three weeks—with one of her cousins, a little fellow in the Hussars, who was shorter even than the American, was of inches markedly fewer than her own. This proved that distinction might be independent of stature—not that she had ever reasoned it out. Doctor Lemon’s facial spareness and his bright ocular attention, which had a fine edge and a marked scale, unfolded and applied rule-fashion, affected her as original, and she thought of them as rather formidable to a good many people, which would do very well in a husband of hers. As she made this reflexion it of course never occurred to her that she herself might suffer true measurement, for she was not a sacrificial lamb. She felt sure his features expressed a mind—a mind immensely useful, like a good hack or whatever, and that he knew how to employ. She would never have supposed him a doctor; though indeed when all was said this was very negative and didn’t account for the way he imposed himself.
“Why, then, did you come?” she asked in answer to his last speech.
“Because it seems to me after all better to see you this way than not to see you at all. I want to know you better.”
“I don’t think I ought to stay here,” she said as she looked round her.