"For goodness sake, Lola, quit making riddles. Just what do you think you are talking about?"
"Do you mean to tell me," demanded Lola, turning toward her, "that Mr. Rutledge did not ask you to marry him and that you didn't tell him there was no answer,—that you didn't treat him with contempt, with indifference, with just about as much consideration as you would a clerk who gave you a hand-bill of a cut-price sale? There now!"
"So that's the cause of all this—this self-respect, the reason for all this religious silence of his lips—while his eyes work overtime? I thought it was becau—that it—that there was really something; and is that all!" Elise laughed merrily.
"I think it's shameful, myself!" said Lola severely. "I glory in his resentment."
"I have never noticed any resentment, and—I did not treat him so," replied the quick-witted Elise combatively. Quietly her heart laughed on.
"You deny it?" asked Lola.
"Yes, I deny it. He did not ask me to marry him. He simply told me—quite abruptly—that he loved me, and, after some time, asked me for my answer. What was I to answer? When there is no question there can be no answer. So I told him there was no answer. If a man will insist upon an answer he must not be so stupid as to forget to put a question."
Elise chuckled inwardly as she constructed this specious defence. She was in very good humour with herself,—and with Lola.
"But promise me," she hurried on to say, "that you will not intimate to Mr. Rutledge that it is his stupidity that has swelled his bump of self-respect for these last four years."
Lola demurred to this form of statement: bless her, she was a loyal friend. But Elise insisted.