"And did he?" Forbes asked, in a voice that rattled. "Did he propose to you?"
CHAPTER XXX
SHE studied Forbes closely and laughed aloud at the almost nausea he plainly felt.
"I thought that would shock the nonsense out of you," she triumphed. "Now let's be sensible while the sun shines, and get better acquainted. Tell me more about you, and I'll tell you some awful things about me."
She sauntered on in an arch and riant humor. He resented it, and yet he followed her, hating this mood of hers, yet finding her more precious as he found her more difficult. If he had known women better he would have guessed, or "reckoned," that her very effort to make herself difficult was a proof that she was not really so difficult as she would have him believe. The one who takes such joy in being pursued is not entirely unwilling to be caught.
She quizzed him about his life, his home, his earlier loves. She demanded descriptions of every sweetheart he had cherished, from the first chub of infancy to the girl he left behind in Manila; and she said she hated them all impartially.
She told him of her life: endowed with every material comfort, yet with a vague unhappiness for something or somebody—"perhaps it was for you," she added, but spoke teasingly. She had had nurses and governesses and maids from her first day on earth. She had been to school in France, and traveled round the world; she had been presented at the courts of England and Italy, Germany and Russia; had visited at castles and châteaux. Her sister was in England. She had married a title and was unhappy; but for the matter of that, so were the wives of most of the stanch Americans she knew, rich and poor.
Persis had had flirtations of cosmopolitan variety. Her ambition was to go on skimming the cream off of life. She had given up the hope of ever loving, at least with abandonment. There was too much else in the world. She had been so thoroughly and incessantly schooled in self-control that she doubted if even her heart could forget the rules of conduct. She did not want love to make the fool of her it had made of so many of her friends, and of the people she read about in newspapers and books.