“Which means you are going to worry some one else, just because Overton has annoyed you,” decided Lyster. “That is a woman’s idea of retaliation, I believe. Am I the selected victim?”
“Of course you’re not, or I wouldn’t have told you. All I wanted of you was to give me a start.”
“Exactly; your frankness is not very flattering; but, in spite of it, I’d like to give you a start in a different way—toward a good school, for instance. How would you like that?”
She looked at him for a moment suspiciously, she was so used to raillery from him; then she answered briefly:
“But you are not my guardian, Mr. Max Lyster.”
“Then you prefer card playing?”
“No, I don’t. I’d like it, but my income can’t cover such luxuries, and I have booked myself to play for a time this evening, if I can get the man I want to play with.”
“But that is what you must not do,” he said, hastily. “With Overton or myself, of course, a game would not do you any special harm; but you simply must not indulge 105 in such pastime with this promiscuous gathering of people—of men.”
“But it isn’t men—it’s only one man I want to play—do you see?”
“I might if I knew who it was; but you don’t know any men here but Dan and me.”