“I was at the fancy-work counter at the fair,” said Nan, “and I remember that Mr. Eaton bought something. I didn’t see you, though.”
“I noticed that you didn’t; I was plumb scared you might! There I go again! Plumb scared! Oh, Cecil, if you had heard me then!”
He was wondering just how he happened to be sitting in a parlor on a fashionable street, talking to the only girl he had ever known whose name figured in the society columns, quite as jauntily as he talked with any of the stenographers or salesgirls he knew. He was confident that parlor conversation among the favored of heaven was not of the sort he had, in his own phrase, been “handing out.” This thought gave him pause. He shook his cuffs from under the sleeves of his blue serge coat with a gesture he had caught from Eaton, and felt nervously of the knot of his four-in-hand.
Nan was asking herself whether the fact that a young fellow of Amidon’s deficiencies could interest and amuse her wasn’t pretty substantial proof that he was the kind of young man the gods had designed for her companions. A year ago she would have resented his appearance in the house; to-night she had a feeling that his right to be there was as sound as her own. A different fling of the dice, and it might have been he whom the Farleys rescued from poverty and obscurity.
In spite of his absurdities, she was conscious of definite manly qualities in him. Several times she caught him scrutinizing her sharply, as though something about her puzzled him and gave him concern. His manners were very good—thanks, perhaps, to his adored Eaton; and she liked his clean, fresh look and good humor. After her talk with Eaton on the golf links, she had wondered whether the lawyer wasn’t making a butt of him; but she dismissed this now as unjust to Eaton, and as appraising Amidon’s intelligence at too low a figure. During this reverie he waited patiently for her to speak, imagining that her mind was still upon her troubles, and when the silence became prolonged he rallied for a fresh attack.
“If you’d rather read,” he remarked, “we’ll hang up the silence sign the way they have it in the library reading-room and I’ll say prayers till Cecil comes down.”
“Oh, pardon me!” she laughed contritely. “You see I am treating you as an old friend. Why don’t you go on and talk. You’ve had ever so many interesting adventures, and I need to be amused. Please don’t think I’m always like this; I hope you’ll see me some time when I’m not in the dumps.”
“I should be afraid to,” he retorted boldly; and then feeling that Eaton would have spurned such banality, ejaculated: “Oh, rot! Let me scratch that out and say something decent. Just for instance,”—and his face sobered,—“I think you’re nice! You were perfectly grand to me that day down on the river. I told Cecil about that, and I could see it made a hit with him; it set me up with him—that a girl like you would be polite to a scrub like me.”
“Don’t be foolish,” she said. “I’m not proud of myself: I’m a failure, a pretty sad fizzle, at that.”
She ignored his rapid phrases of protest and asked him how much time he spent in town.