He bent forward. “Are you warning me?”
“I’m trying to let you know the sort of person I am.”
“Well,” he said, leaning back again, and studying her with attention, noting the picture she unconsciously made in her blue robe, with the brown braids hanging over her shoulders, “I’ve been observing you with somewhat close scrutiny for about three years now, and it occurs to me that I’m fairly conversant with your moods and tenses. Perhaps I ought to be warned, but—I’m not.”
“I’ve always been told that sort of thing grows upon one,” she observed.
“What sort of thing? Having one’s own way?”
She nodded.
“You’re right there,” he agreed. “I’ve been wanting mine, more or less strenuously, for three years.”
“Elaine Dennison,” she observed—somewhat irrelevantly, it might seem—“is the dearest, most amiable girl. She loves to make people happy.”
“Yes—and doesn’t succeed. And you—don’t want to make them happy—and—could.”
She shook her head. “No—I never could. Anybody who had much to do with me would have to learn at once that I must have my own way.”