She stopped again, and drew away from him.
"Mr. Holton!" she ejaculated mockingly; "please don't try that kind of jollying on me. I don't like it."
This, uttered with sharp peremptoriness, did not soothe him; nor was he in any humor to be thwarted. He had felt that Phil liked him; and a great many girls had been in love with him. If she made his approaches difficult, there was the more reason for believing that his proposal of marriage would not fall upon ungrateful ears. And, besides, Phil was just the sort of perverse, willful young woman to jump at a proposal, the more readily if the suitor was set apart from her by barriers that invited a young romantic imagination.
"I wasn't jollying you," he said, "and you know I wasn't. You've known from the first that I admired you. In fact, it was all over with me the first time I spoke to you—when you took me down so. I liked your spirit; I hate these tame, perfectly conventional girls; they bore me to death."
"Oh, I like that! How dare you say I'm not perfectly conventional!" she laughed.
"You know perfectly well what I mean. You have a mind and will of your own, and I like that in you. You're a perfect wonder, Phil. You're the most fascinating creature in the world!"
"Creature!" she mocked.
"Look here, Phil; I don't want you to pick me up like that. I'm entitled to better treatment. I'm in terrible earnest and I don't mean to be put off in any such way."
"Well, I'm not afraid to walk home alone!" She made a feint at leaving him; then waited for him to catch up with her.
It had been said of Phil that she liked to tease; she had, with a pardonable joy, made the high-school boys dance to her piping, and the admiration of the young collegians was tempered with awe and fear. She felt herself fully equal to any emergencies that might arise with young men. The boys she had known had all been nice fellows, good comrades, with whom she had entered into boyish sports zestfully, until her lengthening skirts had excluded her from participation in town-ball and the spring's delight in marbles. When her chums became seniors in college and appeared at parties in dress-suits, the transformation struck her as funny. They were still the "boys" who had admired the ease with which she threw, and caught, and batted, and whom she had bankrupted in naughty games of chance with marbles. She liked Charles Holton. The difference in their years added to the flattery of his attentions. He was a practiced flirt, and she had made experiments of her own in the gentle art of flirtation. Phil was human.