But Peggy had by this time joined her aunt.
“Ralph Marshall; how extraordinary to see you out here! You are the very last person I would ever have dreamed of. I thought, after your visit to us, you were to stay on and study scientific farming with father.”
“Oh, well, I have concluded to be a ranchman instead,” Ralph returned, smiling and shaking hands with Peggy.
Peggy was pleased to see him. He had been a guest at their place several times while she was growing up and was really a charming fellow, if a little spoiled by his father’s wealth. Then his people were friends of Bettina’s mother and father, as well as of her own.
CHAPTER XV
The Storm
Ralph Marshall decided that he never had seen Bettina Graham so agreeable nor so good looking as she was tonight.
Ralph was a great admirer of Bettina’s mother; indeed, whenever he made a visit to Washington, he was always in Mrs. Graham’s train. And he knew that Mrs. Graham wished him to be friends with her daughter; indeed, she had frankly told him so, announcing that she believed the one would be good for the other. For Bettina, in her mother’s eyes, was too grave, too given to yielding to odd fancies and too indifferent to people, while Ralph, in contrast, was too frivolous and fond of society. He was some day to inherit great wealth, so his father was trying vainly to interest him in something of importance. His excursions to Washington and his connection with Senator Graham were in order to inform him of national affairs. Failing that interest, for Ralph had announced himself as bored to death by politics, he had gone for a few weeks to the Webster farm, pretending to have developed a curiosity concerning scientific farming.
But, really, Ralph was only concerned at present with having an agreeable time. He was not a student and had barely managed to be allowed to remain at college. He was not a first-rate athlete, for athletics required too much self-sacrifice to appeal to Ralph. But he had a charming voice and was one of the stars of his college glee club, and there was not a man in college who danced better.
So he and Bettina really were too great a contrast in all their ideas and desires ever to have been intimate friends up to the present time, in spite of the family wishes.
Tonight, however, Ralph had concluded that Bettina was almost a real girl, and not a prig given to writing poetry and reading a lot of dull books that would bore any natural human being to death. She was evidently interested in all kinds of outdoor sports, which she must have learned through her Camp Fire work, and Ralph always had been forced to concede that Bettina knew how to dance. She was so tall and slender and, just as she had a peculiar light grace in walking, so she had it in dancing.