“Well, I've heard all about the last hundred thousand or so, I think. But there's perfect safety in thousands. It's when you start being so stalwart and sure and manly about one—”
Oliver spread out his hands. Elinor's color—the way it fluctuated at least—was most encouraging. So was the fact that she had tried to butter her last muffin with the handle of her knife. “But I don't see how if a girl really cared about a man she could let anything—” she said and then stopped with a burning flush. And now Oliver knew that he had to be very careful. He looked over his tools and decided that infantile bitterness was best.
“Girls are girls,” he said shortly, stabbing a muffin. “They tell you they do and then they tell you they don't—that's them.”
“Oliver Crowe, I never heard such a nasty, childish seventeen-year-old idea from you in my whole life!” Oh what would calm Mrs. Piper say if she could see Elinor, eyes cloudy with anger, leaning across the tea-wagon and emphasizing her points by waves of a jammy knife as she defends constancy and romance! “They do not! When a girl cares for a man—and she knows he cares for her—she doesn't care about anything else, she—”
“That's what Nancy said,” remarked Oliver placidly out of his muffin. “And then—”
“Well, you know I'm sorry for you—you know I'm just as sorry for you as I can be,” went on Elinor excitedly. “But all the same, my dear Ollie, you have no right in the least to say that just because one girl has broken her engagement with you, all girls are the same. I know dozens of girls—” “So do I,” from Oliver, quietly. “Dozens. And they're just the same.”
“They aren't. And I haven't the slightest wish to suggest that it was your fault, Oliver—but no girl as sweet and friendly and darling as Nancy Ellicott, the little I knew of her that is, but other girls can tell, and she certainly thought you were the person that made all the stars come out in the sky and twinkle, would go and break her engagement entirely of her own accord—you must have—”
And now Oliver looked at her with a good deal of sorrowful pity—she had delivered herself so completely into his hands.
“I never said it was her fault, Elinor,” he said gently, keeping the laughter back by a superb effort of will. “It was mine, I am sure,” and then he added most sorrowfully, “All mine.”
“Well!”