“There is something,” he continued, “that I wish to ask you. May I?”
She bit her lip, then laughed, her gray eyes searching his. “Ask it, Mr. Burleson, for if I lived a million years I’m perfectly certain I could never guess what you are going to say next.”
“It’s only this,” he said, with a worried look, “I don’t know your first name.”
“Why should you?” she demanded, amused, yet instinctively resentful. “I don’t know yours, either, Mr. Burleson—and I don’t even ask you.”
“Oh, I’ll tell you,” he said; “my name is only John William. Now will you tell me yours?”
She remained silent, coping with a candor that she had not met with since she went to parties in a muslin frock. She remembered one boy who had proposed elopement on ten minutes’ acquaintance. Burleson, somehow or other, reminded her of that boy.
“My name,” she said, carelessly, “is Constance.”
“I like that name,” said Burleson.
It was pretty nearly the last straw. Never had she been conscious of being so spontaneously, so unreasonably approved of since that wretched boy had suggested flight at her first party. She could not separate the memory of the innocent youth from Burleson; he was intensely like that boy; and she had liked the boy, too—liked him so much that in those ten heavenly minutes’ acquaintance she was half persuaded to consent—only there was nowhere to fly to, and before they could decide her nurse arrived.
“If you had not told me your first name,” said Burleson, “how could anybody make out a check to your order?”