Well, there we sat. "Mr. Belknap is doing a wonderful work among these poor people," explained Mary to me. There was something prim in her speech that knocked another color off the meeting.
"You are too good," said Mr. Belknap. He was modest, too, in a way that reproached you for daring to talk of him so careless. I wished that Mr. Belknap would get to work on his poor people and leave us alone, but he had no such intention.
"Miss Smith," says he, "is one of those who credit others with the excellencies they believe in from possession."
Mary colored, and a little frown I could not understand lay on her forehead for the second. It was curious, that man's way. When he made his speech it was like he put a rope upon the girl. I didn't see much meaning to it, except a compliment, but I felt something behind it, and suddenly I understood her frown. It was the way you look when something you feel you ought to do, that you've worked yourself into believing you want to do, although at the bottom of your heart you'd chuck it quick, comes up for action.
I'd have broken into the talk if I could, but Brother Belknap had me tongue-tied, so I just sat, wishful to go, in spite of Mary, and unable to start. It seemed like presuming a good deal to leave, or do anything else Mr. Belknap hadn't mentioned.
We talked like advice to the young in the third reader. Mr. Belknap announced his topics and smiled his superior knowledge. I'd have hit him in the eye for two cents, and at the same time if he told me to run away like a good little boy, darned if I don't believe I'd done it—me, that chased the road-agent up the valley not three hours before!
Mary moved her glass in little circles and looked off into distance. Something of the change from our first being together, to this, was working in her. "It is hard," she said, trying to pass it off lightly, "to bear the weight of virtues that don't belong to me!"
Mr. Belknap leaned forward. He was a heavy-built, easy-moving man; you had to grant him a kind of elegance that went queer enough with the preacher-air he wore of his own will. He put his head out and looked at her. I watched him close, and I saw a crafty, hard light in his eyes as if the tiger in him had come for a look out of doors. He purred soft, like a tiger. "Nowhere is humility more becoming than in a beautiful woman."
At that minute his hold on me snapped. Believing him honest, he had me kiboshed—seeing that expression, which, I suppose, he didn't think worth while hiding from a gawky kid—I was my own man again, hating him and ready for war with him, in a blaze. Too young to understand much about love-affairs and the like of that, I still knew those eyes, that had shifted in a second from pompous piety to cunning, meant no good to Mary.
"I don't know about humility," says I, "but I'll go bail for Mary's honesty." I laid my hand on hers as I spoke. Funny that I did that and spoke as I did. It came to me at once, without thinking—like I'd been a dog and bristled at him for a sure-enough tiger.