A curious smile passed over Polly's face and she put up her glass to hide her eyes, as she said: “I think you are bats sometimes, but women are taught to wear masks, and that accounts for it, I suppose.”
“I don't agree. There's precious little masking nowadays; wish there was a little more sometimes,” added Tom, thinking of several blooming damsels whose beseeching eyes had begged him not to leave them to wither on the parent stem.
“I hope not, but I guess there's a good deal more than any one would suspect.”
“What can you know about broken hearts and blighted beings?” asked Sydney, smiling at the girl's pensive tone.
Polly glanced up at him and her face dimpled and shone again, as she answered, laughing: “Not much; my time is to come.”
“I can't imagine you walking about the world with your back hair down, bewailing a hard-hearted lover,” said Tom.
“Neither can I. That would n't be my way.”
“No; Miss Polly would let concealment prey on her damask cheeks and still smile on in the novel fashion, or turn sister of charity and nurse the heartless lover through small-pox, or some other contagious disease, and die seraphically, leaving him to the agonies of remorse and tardy love.”
Polly gave Sydney an indignant look as he said that in a slow satirical way that nettled her very much, for she hated to be thought sentimental.
“That's not my way either,” she said decidedly. “I'd try to outlive it, and if I could n't, I'd try to be the better for it. Disappointment need n't make a woman a fool.”