Vivienne laughed despite herself at the disordered appearance of her always faultlessly attired guardian, who was caricatured as sitting at a table, his hair sticking up all over his head, his fingers tracing with furious haste across the open page of a huge account book the quotation,
This tough, impracticable heart
Is governed by a dainty-fingered girl.
“Now you mustn’t laugh at this one,” he said warningly, as he turned the paper over. “It’s too tragic. ‘Will she marry me? oh, will she marry me?’ See, there is the wharf and the deep black water.”
Vivienne did laugh. A few spirited pencil marks showed a man and a maid standing beside each other at the end of a wharf, against which waves were dashing. The girl’s face was averted, the man’s attitude plainly said, “If you don’t do as I wish you to I shall throw myself into a watery grave.”
“Oh, put it away,” she said merrily, “or I shall bring disgrace upon myself. I did not know that you had so great a talent for caricature.”
He put the paper in his pocket and said gloomily: “If I had a sister and Stanton Armour asked her to marry him and she wouldn’t, I’d shut her up somewhere.”
“What a regrettable thing for Mr. Armour that this obdurate fair one is not related to you.”
“Obdurate? She’s not obdurate,” said the physician, surveying Vivienne half in affection, half in irritation. “I don’t understand some men. They beat about the bush and examine their motives, and shilly-shally till it makes one wild to see them. Why don’t they say to the women they love, ‘I’m going mad for love of you; you must marry me. I’ll wait and watch, but I must have you. You shall not marry another man‘?”
“Mr. Armour is of a different nature,” said Vivienne.