If anyone had asked Dagny Harden, at that period, just what she wanted of young Cleeve, she would not have known what to answer.
She was a great flirt, but, at the same time, she was a very kind woman, and never willfully gave pain to anyone.
A careful study of the science of flirting and its masters and mistresses would probably prove that the greatest—in the sense of artistic skill—flirts are those people who have excitable brains and little imagination.
Dagny Harden had been fond of him in a mild, domestic, sincere way that satisfied both him and herself, and that had never faltered.
She had, however, a really remarkable dramatic talent, and this needing outlet, she interested herself with a series of gracefully conducted, scandal-avoiding flirtations, in which she appeared to each man as a very good woman, found by him personally to be more charming than she intended.
These men, some of them, suffered intensely during their term, but they had no bitterness for her.
And she, liking them all—for she was discriminating, and never let herself in for an affair with a dull man—had really no appreciation of their suffering.
When she had turned a victim’s mind and heart wrong side out; when she had watched the wheels go round; when all had been said that could be said without her nice scales of judgment being weighed down on the side of either too great severity or too great indulgence, it was good-by.
She was exquisitely ruthless, brutally enchanting, admirably cruel.
And she never talked of her victims to each other or to other women. She was, in a way, great.