"Do you mean Shiela Cardross?"
"Obviously."
"You think it safe?"—mockingly.
"I wouldn't care if I were a man."
"Oh! I didn't suppose that a Suydam could approve of her."
"I do now—with envy.... You are right about the West. Do you know that it seems to me as though in that girl all sections of the land were merged, as though the freshest blood of all nations flowing through the land had centred and mingled to produce that type of physical perfection! It is a curious idea—isn't it, Louis?—to imagine that the brightest, wholesomest, freshest blood of the nations within this nation has combined to produce such a type! Suppose it were so. After all is it not worth dispensing with a few worn names to look out at the world through those fearless magnificent eyes of hers—to walk the world with such limbs and such a body? Did you ever see such self-possession, such superb capacity for good and evil, such quality and texture!... Oh, yes, I am quite crazy about her—like everybody and John Garret Hamil, third."
"Is he?"
She laughed. "Do you doubt it?"
Malcourt drew bridle, fished for his case, and lighted a cigarette; then he spurred forward again, alert, intent, head partly turned in that curious attitude of listening, though Virginia was riding now in pensive silence.
"Louis," she said at last, "what is it you hear when you seem to listen that way. It's uncanny."