"Yet you have never been in love with me!" I challenged.
He hesitated.
"I have always felt very close to you," he endeavored to explain. "We have so many things in common—there is, of course, a peculiar congeniality—"
"Congeniality?"
It struck me that the only point of congeniality between us was that we were both Caucasians, but I didn't say it.
"Our parents were friends long before we were born! This, of itself, certainly must bring in its wake a degree of mutual affection," he explained, and as the words "mutual affection" came unfeelingly from his lips I suddenly felt a thousand years further advanced in wisdom than he.
"But real love may be—is, I'm sure—a vastly different thing from the regard we've had for each other," I ventured, trying not to make a display of my superiority in learning, but he interrupted me contemptuously.
"'Real love!' What could you possibly know about that?" he asked chillingly. "You, who are ready to flirt with any stray foreigner who chances to stop over in this city for a week! But for me—why, I have never glanced at another woman! I have always understood my good fortune in being affianced to the one woman in the whole country round who was best fitted to bear the honored name which has descended to me."
When he said this I began to feel sorry for him. I was not sorry for his disappointment, you understand, but for his view-point. "I was never fitted for it, Guilford!" I said humbly. "It's true I come of the same sort of stock that produced you—but I am awkwardly grafted on my family tree! At heart I am a barbarian."
"What do you mean?"