Annie smiled and shook her head, but did not reply further, and Louis went on,—
“What I love in her, I suppose, is my ideal,—what she might be, or, as Mr. Clare would say, what she will be when all that is evil is purged away from her nature. O Annie! how lovely she will be then!”
“Yes, indeed,” said Annie heartily; though, if her true opinion had been given, it would have been that, when vanity and sauciness should be purged out of Miss Rosalie Randolph, there would be not enough of her left to swear by.
“I often think,” pursued Louis, whose natural turn for speculative philosophy had been decidedly fostered by intercourse with Ernest Clare,—“I often think, Aenchen, when people talk about being disappointed and deceived in their friends, that it is not really so. One may be deceived by a person one loves, not in him. For what gives and attracts love is the real self, independent of all accidents; and, sin being not a part of that self, it follows that when we meet in that happy world the false friend of earth, we shall recognize the self we really loved, and feel that the deceit was in our bad opinion of him, not in our good one.”
“That is very beautiful,” murmured Annie. And while he was smiling at her in all the pleasure of sympathy and comprehension, and she gazing into his face with eyes that half betrayed her wonder what Louis’ real self could be, since his present and apparent self was so bright and beautiful,—at this moment there passed them alight, open buggy, wherein sat Edgar Harrison and a small figure in black, whose brown eyes took in the full significance of the sight presented to them.
“Your friend, the handsome young shoemaker, and his sweetheart,” said Edgar Harrison. “I suppose they are awfully happy; don’t you?”
“Really, I don’t know; I can’t pretend to understand the feelings of that sort of people,” said Miss Randolph haughtily.
Edgar watched her with quiet amusement. He was not at all afraid of Louis as a rival, though admitting that in a higher station of life he might have been dangerous. “Well, they look pretty happy,” he said.
Pinkie shrugged her shoulders, a gesture she had learned in Paris, without reply; but her first act, upon reaching her own room, was to throw aside her crape-trimmed hat, and study her own pretty face reflected in the glass, as attentively as if it had been the Rosetta stone or a Babylonian cylinder. Then the red lips curved into a triumphant smile.
“I’ll settle him,” said Pinkie, with a toss of her head.