(I did. I had wondered myself, but now I understood.)
"Perhaps he doesn't care for the sort of thing that other men value," said Miss Thurston. I fancied a trace of bitterness under her sweet indifference.
"It isn't that," said Mr. Whyte, frowningly. "He is thoroughly alive. And he doesn't keep out of public matters so long as he can work behind a committee. Everybody knows what he has done for the city without letting his name get into the papers. I think it's a crank notion he's got."
"It probably goes back to some disappointing love affair," said Mrs. Whyte, impressively. "That sort of thing will take the ambition out of a man like--like poison."
"But wouldn't we have heard of it?" asked Miss Thurston, lifting her penciled eyebrows. "We have known Kenneth Clyde all his life, you and I, and there never has been anything talked of--"
"There wouldn't be," interrupted Mrs. Whyte. "He wouldn't talk. But what else, I ask you, could change the reckless, ambitious, arrogant boy that he was,--you know he was, Katherine,--into the abnormally modest man he has become,--"
"I don't think he is abnormally modest," Miss Thurston interrupted in her turn. "He merely doesn't care for newspaper fame,--and who does? He has grown into a finer man than his early promise. If Saintsbury can get him for mayor,--"
"He won't take it," Mr. Whyte said pessimistically. "You'd have to hypnotize him to make him accept."
"Do you believe in hypnotism, Mr. Hilton?" Mrs. Whyte turned to me, evidently fearing that I would feel "out" of this intimate conversation.
"Believe that it can be exercised? Why, yes, I suppose there is no doubt of that. But I don't believe I should care to let anyone experiment on me.