RoBards nodded. That was probably true. But what was the uncanny genius of Chalender? He was a very politician among women as well as men. He allied himself with great causes and carried them greatly through, yet always managed to see that he and his friends profited somehow.
For years he and his clique had been storming the public ear for a city water supply, and had made prophecy of just such a calamity as this. And now he and his partisans could stand above the smoking pyre of the city and crow a gigantic, “I told you so!”
As RoBards sat inert and lugubriously ridiculous, Patty regarded him with a studious eye. She dazed him by saying after a long hush:
“Since you don’t want me to go back to my father’s house, I’ll stay here.”
He would have risen and seized her to his breast with a groan of rapture if she had said this in the far-off ages before the last few minutes of their parley. But now he grew even more contemptible in his own mind. There was no note of pity or of love in her voice, and he was so wretched that he muttered:
“Are you staying here because your father’s home is too gloomy to endure, or because you can’t give up the pleasure of gloating over my misery?”
Incomprehensible woman! When he tried to insult her, she always parried or stepped aside and came home with a thrust of perfect confusion for him.
And now that he had hurled at her the dirtiest missile of contempt within his reach, instead of crying out in rage, marching off in hurt pride, or throwing something at him, she laughed aloud and flung herself across his lap and hugged his neck with bare, warm arms till he choked.
“You are the stupidest darling alive. But every now and then, when you get horribly superior or hideously downcast you say the wisest things! Why is it that you understand me only when you are mad at me?”
He put lonely, hunting hands about her lithe, stayless waist, and smothered his face among the white hawthorn buds in the snowy lane of her bosom.