"I--I don't understand you," she whispered, shocked.
"Why, I do monkey tricks to entertain people," he replied, forcing a laugh, "or rather, I hope to do a few--and be paid for them. I fancy every man finds his own level; I've found mine, apparently."
Her face was inscrutable; she lay back in the great chair, watching him.
"I have a little money left," he said; "enough to last a day or two. Then I am to be paid for entertaining some people at Seabright; and," he added with that very attractive smile of his from which all bitterness had departed, "and that will be the first money I ever earned in all my life."
She was young enough to be fascinated, child enough to feel the little lump in her throat rising. She knew he was poor; her sisters had told her that; but she had supposed it to be only comparative poverty--just as her cousins, for instance, had scarcely enough to keep more than two horses in town and only one motor. But want--actual need--she had never dreamed of in his case--she could scarcely understand it even now--he was so well groomed, so attractive, fairly radiating good breeding and the easy financial atmosphere she was accustomed to.
"So you see," he continued gayly, "if you complain to the owners about green mice, why, I shall have to leave, and, as a matter of fact, I haven't enough money to go anywhere except--" he laughed.
"Where?" she managed to say.
"The Park. I was joking, of course," he hastened to add, for she had turned rather white.
"No," she said, "you were not joking." And as he made no reply: "Of course, I shall not write--now. I had rather my studio were overrun with multicolored mice--" She stopped with something almost like a sob. He smiled, thinking she was laughing.
But oh, the blow for her! In her youthful enthusiasm she had always, from the first time they had encountered one another, been sensitively aware of this tall, clean-cut, attractive young fellow. And by and by she learned his name and asked her sisters about him, and when she heard of his recent ruin and withdrawal from the gatherings of his kind her youth flushed to its romantic roots, warming all within her toward this splendid and radiant young man who lived so nobly, so proudly aloof. And then--miracle of Manhattan!--he had proved his courage before her dazed eyes--rising suddenly out of the very earth to save her from a fate which her eager desire painted blacker every time she embellished the incident. And she decorated the memory of it every day.