"Even if I hadn't been preoccupied, it would never have entered my head that you seriously objected to being admired."
She received this in injured silence. Matthias chuckled to himself and settled more comfortably into his seat. The motor-car turned off the main road from the station to the village of Port Madison, down which the greater number of its predecessors had clattered, and found unclouded air on a well-metalled lane bordered with aged oaks and maples. Through a funnel-like dip between hills, Matthias, looking past his aunt, caught a fleeting glimpse of the cluttered roofs of Port Madison, its shallow, land-locked harbour set with a little fleet of pleasure boats, and the ineffable, burning blue of the distant Sound....
"I presume," Helena returned to the charge, disarmingly aggrieved, "you think I ought to be grateful for your condescending to return at all!"
"Forgive me," he pleaded, not altogether insincerely; "I know it wasn't right of me to run away like that, but I couldn't help it."
"You couldn't help it!" she murmured despairingly.
"That's just the way of it. I got to thinking about a play I wanted to write, yesterday afternoon, and—well, along about ten o'clock it got too strong for me. I just had to get back to my typewriter. You know how that is."
"I? What do I know about your silly playwriting?"
Laughing, he bent nearer and patted the gloved hand on the cushions beside him. "You know perfectly well, Helena dear, what it is to want to do something so bad you simply can't help yourself. It's the Matthias blood in both of us. That's why you ran off and married Tankerville against everybody's advice. Of course, it did turn out beautifully; but you didn't stop to wonder whether it would or not when you took it into your head to marry him. The same with me: you decide that it's high time for your delightful sister-in-law to get married, and you look round and fix on your dutiful nephew for the bridegroom-elect—wholly because you want it to be that way."
"Don't you?" she demanded sharply.
He took a moment to think this over. "I suppose I do," he admitted almost reluctantly. "But—"