“Why not?” repeated Mazie.
Odell shook his frowsy head: “He’ll want a rich girl. Eris hain’t got only that heifer-money. I can’t give her more’n a mite——”
“That don’t count with me, Elmer.” She flushed, “—it didn’t count with you.”
“Well, you was worth consid’ble more’n cash,” he grunted.
“So’s any girl—if a boy likes her.”
“You think a smart man like Stew Graydon——”
“How do I know?” drawled Mazie. “She’s downstairs yet with him, ain’t she? I never knew her to act that way before. Nor you, either.”
She never had “acted that way before.”
The drowning swimmer and his straw—Eris and the first man she ever had met who had been actually in touch with the mystery of the moving pictures—that was the situation.