"Well!" The man's egotism aroused her impatience, but she lowered her head to catch every syllable of his reply.
"I seemed to see things in a flash—to feel an iron crust of prejudice."
The girl's brow contracted in a puzzled frown, but she waited. The young doctor tried again to phrase the matter.
"These people—I mean your comfortable rich—seem to have taken a kind of oath of self-preservation. To do what is expected of one, to succeed, you must take the oath. You must defend their institutions, and all that," he blundered on.
"I don't know what you mean," the girl replied coolly, haughtily, raising her head and glancing over the table.
"I am not very clear. Perhaps I make a great deal of nothing. My remarks sound 'young' even to me."
"I don't pretend to understand these questions. I wish men wouldn't talk business at dinner. It is worse than polo!"
She swept his face with a glance of distrust, the lids of her eyes half lowered, as if to put a barrier between them.
"Yes," Sommers assented; "it is harder to understand."
It was curious, he thought, that a woman could take on the new rights, the aristocratic attitude, so much more completely than a man. Miss Hitchcock was a full generation ahead of the others in her conception of inherited, personal rights. As the dinner dragged on, there occurred no further opportunity for talk until near the end, when suddenly the clear, even tones of Miss Hitchcock's voice brought his idle musing to an end.