“I am sure that your friends are very nice,” she promptly assured him.
“Bert's crazy about girls,” he remarked, half contemptuously.
“And you... don't care for them?”
“I don't know anything about them,” he admitted with an abrupt, unconscious honesty.
“But there must have been—there must be—one,” she persisted.
She leaned forward, and he met her gaze with unwavering candor. “Not that many,” he returned.
“It would be wonderful to care for just one person, always,” she continued intently: “I had a dream when I was quite young.... I dreamed that a marvellous happiness would follow a constancy like that. Father rather laughs at me, and quotes Shakespeare—the 'one foot on land and one on shore' thing. Perhaps, but it's too bad.”
Anthony gravely considered this new idea in relation to his own, hitherto lamented, lack of experience. It dawned upon him that the idea of manly success he had cherished would appear distasteful to Eliza Dreen. She had indirectly extolled the very thing of which he had been secretly ashamed. He thought in conjunction with her of the familiar group at the drugstore, and in this light the latter retreat suffered a disconcerting change: Thomas Meredith appeared sly and trivial, and unhealthy; Williams an empty braggard; Craik ineffectual, untidy. He surveyed himself without enthusiasm.
“You are different from any one I ever knew,” he told her.
“Oh, there are millions of me,” she returned; “but you are different. I didn't like you for a sou at first; but there is something about you like—like a very clear spring of water. That's idiotic, but it's what I mean. There is an early morning feeling about you. I am very sensitive to people,” she informed him, “some make me uncomfortable directly they come into the room. There was a curé at Etretat I perfectly detested, and he turned out to be an awful person.”