“Aunt Anne,” she said with considerable earnestness, and omitting the restrictive word in the elder woman’s title, “I suppose no one quite understands these things. I don’t altogether. But I have decided that when I say I want Kit that about covers it. It’s precisely what I said awhile ago about Anne Dallas. Attraction attracts, and you can’t define wherein it lies. Kit’s strong, virile beauty—he really is an awfully well-set-up chap—attracts me. Others may have it, in fact they have; the average college boy gets a lot of it if he trains, but in Kit I like it best. I like the way he nods at me when he says something which he thinks is profound and which I’ve always known. I especially like the way his hair grows in the back of his neck, and he has one funny ear lobe, sort of kinky—ever notice it? He doesn’t know what fear is, either physical or moral; doesn’t stop to find it out that it exists. He has a dandy voice in talking, and he says deliciously fool things about girls! He’s strong, clean—I could do a lot with him if he’d love me. And I’m pretty sure he’d get taught how to love me if I married him. I’d put myself out to teach him, and I know how to teach! I think that’s about all there is to it. As I say, it comes to the one thing with which I started: I want Kit Carrington!”
Miss Carrington always sat straight in a straight chair, so she could not be more erect than she had been, yet she had the effect of sitting straighter as she listened to Helen; she became alert.
“Helen, child, all that you say must mean, it does mean, that you are in love with Kit! I never dreamed that you were in love with him, but you surely are. I am glad of it. This atavism of mine, as you call it, makes it easier for me to carry out our bargain knowing that you are in love with the boy,” she cried.
“Oh, come, now, Miss Carrington,” laughed Helen. “I play the game with you, cards face up on the table. You are the sort of woman with whom one can do that; you can’t with most of them. I’m not in love with Kit sentimentally; there isn’t a drop of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning slush in it! What’s that thing she wrote? ‛Unless you can muse in a crowd on the face that fixed you?’ Heavens! When I’m in the midst of a crowd I’m busy seeing to it that it knows I’m there! And no face ever fixed me—sounds like a spitted chicken! Stuff! If I get Kit—and I mean to—I’ll be as pleased as Punch, and so shall he, I promise you. But if I don’t get him I’ll take someone else and make a good thing of it. What I won’t do is to fail in life. I want Kit, do you see? He suits me; I want him. I like all the things about him that I enumerated, and then some. Simply and truthfully, I want Kit. We’d make a corking pair. He’s good material. As far as this is worth, I am in love with Kit. But you and I are wide-awake women, with the right labels on ourselves and our world, only I’m beginning to think I’m the elder, you nice old Anne Carrington! Help me to capture your boy and we’ll never repent it, you nor I, nor that silly Christopher, who thinks, or will think if we don’t straighten his thoughts for him, that he wants that demure mouse! She would make him gruel, possibly, but she would surely make any clever man who had to put up with her monotony sick to the point of needing gruel! She’s just the average woman since Eve, Aunt Anne!”
“There’s no such thing as an average woman, Helen Abercrombie!” laughed Miss Carrington. “Untold millions of them since Eve, and every one of them a special creation—ending with you, who are, I confess, the least average of any I have known.”
Helen laughed with her and said:
“Helen fired Troy; it’s queer if she can’t set Kit afire. See here, Miss Carrington, why aren’t we riding, Kit and I? Don’t you know that on a horse I inevitably ride to victory?”
“I’ll have them here in the morning, Helen,” said Miss Carrington. “Make Kit start early enough to ride to the Daphne Woods. It’s the most exquisite, the most emotional road I’ve ever seen, here or abroad.”
“Its name is all of that; I remember it from other visits. I always thought there must have been a poet here before Mr. Latham’s time to name those woods. All right; Daphne Woods it shall be for Kit and me to-morrow morning. And thanks, Miss Carrington, for this satisfactory confession I’ve made. Do I understand that I am shriven?” Helen asked, rising.
“Of what you intend to do? Even an old pagan like me knows that you can’t be shriven of an intention to act, unless you give up the intention. And I hope you will not abandon your plan to steal Kit!”