She flushed a little. “I like to hear that. My father would have liked it. What makes you say it?”
“It’s—it’s your honesty, I think. There’s a quality of frankness about you that could be—well, almost brutal, I think. Do you know what I mean?”
“I suppose I am a crank. That is American enough, is it not?” she laughed. “A crank about the truth. I hate anything that even suggests a lie, or a dodging, or an evasion. So perhaps I should not like your newspaper profession.”
“But that’s just it!” he cried eagerly. “If one had a paper of one’s own, he could make his own rules for the game.”
“If he were big enough—and brave enough.”
“Brave enough,” he repeated. “Eli Wade said that about you, too. Reading your character from your shoes, you know. That you had courage and honesty. I think he thought it a rare thing in a woman.”
“It is not,” she flashed. “But if I have, it is no credit to me. I have wholly loved and trusted only one person on earth. That was my father, and he was the soul of truth. So, some of my friends laugh at me a little and think me a crank, because I have—what do you Americans—we Americans say?—no use for any one whom I cannot wholly trust.”
“And you would be hard, too,” he said.
“Perhaps. If I were, it would be because I could not help it. I think that I do things because something inside makes me before I have even time to consider, sometimes.”
“Like your standing up alone at the Federated German meeting. By the way, I brought my story of it for you to read.”