“You over-rate my poor powers!” he said. “But—‘sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.’ The Publisher may not be made of adamant—many publishers are!—possibly when he sees Miss Maynard—”
“Oh!” exclaimed Sylvia, “I could never persuade a publisher, I’m sure!”
“How can you be sure?” queried the Philosopher, blandly. “Your persuasion—quite unconscious, no doubt! has persuaded a far more difficult type of being!”
“Yes?” and she made the query wonderingly.
“Yes!—and very much yes!” and he smiled,—then, as she rose from the dinner table and prepared to leave the men to their smoke—“You are going? We shall be swift to follow—at all events one of us will!”
His smile broke into a kindly laugh as Jack sprang up and held open the dining-room door for his “rose-lady” to pass out. His adoring eyes fixed upon her as she went made her nervous, and she was glad to get away by herself into the seclusion of her own little morning-room where, as she now remembered with a whimsical touch of regret, the Philosopher had found her, as he declared, on her “high horse.” It was a long time since she had mounted that “tall quadruped,”—the spirit of doing so had rather deserted her.
“I don’t think I shall ever ride the high horse again!” she said, with a little sigh. “I couldn’t do it with Jack—he’s too kind. He never rubs one up the wrong way. Yet, of course,—sometimes—”
Yes! Sometimes it does one good to be rubbed up the wrong way! It starts the electricity in pussy-cat’s fur, and wakes the half-asleep individuality in a human being. She thought about this for some few minutes—she also tried to recall the Philosopher’s various rudenesses, cynicisms, and ugly, unbecoming ways—but, considered in the recent light in which he had shown his character, they were not so very bad,—they all “seemed now in the waste of years, such a very little thing!”
“I’m sorry!” she said, half aloud to the silence around her. “Sorry I misunderstood his temperament! But he was,—he could be quite odious and snappy!—and I’m sure he would have been twenty times worse as a husband!”
Here her meditations came to an end—for a pleading voice said: