“More danger, I suppose,” she thought impatiently.... “Well, what is this danger that seems to travel like one’s shadow, dogging a girl through the world? It seems to me that if all the pleasant things of life are so full of danger I’d better find out what it is.... I might as well look for it so that I’ll recognize it when I encounter it.... And learn to keep away.”
She scanned the flowery thickets attentively, looked behind her, then walked on.
“If it’s robbers they mean,” she reflected, “I’m a good wrestler, and I can make any one of my four brothers-in-law look foolish.... Besides, the Park is full of fat policemen.... And if they mean I’m likely to get lost, or run over, or arrested, or poisoned with soda-water and bonbons—” She
laughed to herself, swinging on in her free-limbed, wholesome beauty, scarcely noticing a man ahead, occupying a bench half hidden under the maple’s foliage.
“So I’ll just look about for this danger they are all afraid of, and when I see it, I’ll know what to do,” she concluded, paying not the slightest heed to the man on the bench until he rose, as she passed him, and took off his hat.
“You!” she exclaimed.
She had stopped short, confronting him with the fearless and charming directness natural to her. “What an amusing accident,” she said frankly.
“The truth is,” he began, “it is not exactly an accident.”
“Isn’t it?”
“N—no.... Are you offended?”