His awkward, well-meant pleasantry, perhaps not conceived in the best of taste, sounded in his own ears wretchedly flat and vapid. He regretted it spontaneously; the girl ignored it.
"You are very kind," she iterated the first words he had heard from her lips. "I wish you to understand that I, for one, appreciate it."
"Not kind; I have done nothing. I am glad.... One is apt to become interested when Romance is injected into a prosaic existence." Kirkwood allowed himself a keen but cheerful glance.
She nodded, with a shadowy smile. He continued, purposefully, to distract her, holding her with his honest, friendly eyes.
"Since it is to be confidences" (this she questioned with an all but imperceptible lifting of the eyebrows), "I don't mind telling you my own name is really Philip Kirkwood."
"And you are an old friend of my father's?"
He opened his lips, but only to close them without speaking. The girl moved her shoulders with a shiver of disdain.
"I knew it wasn't so."
"You know it would be hard for a young man like myself to be a very old friend," he countered lamely.
"How long, then, have you known each other?"