She slid a slim satin hand into mine. I was not at all certain to what she was alluding, but I took pleasure in assuring her that if I had anything to forgive, I forgave it from my heart.
She withdrew her hand after a time with a sudden hauteur and caprice of prudery, which was perhaps one of those delightful little ways to which Thorpe had alluded.
"I missed you so after you left Belfield," she went on, her color deepening as she spoke. "Everything seemed dull. No matter what we tried to do, it seemed duller than what had gone before."
We were all of us strong in quotations in those days; accordingly I quoted—
"Peter was dull: he was at first
Dull—oh, so dull! so very dull!
Whether he talked, wrote or rehearsed,
Still with the dulness was he cursed—
Dull—beyond all conception dull."
"Oh, how clever!" she exclaimed. "Did you write it?"
"Well, no: I think not."
"But you can do such things. You are so clever, everything is easy to you. That is why I always liked you better than any one else. You have sympathy, wit, imagination. You understand things up to the heights and down to the depths. Harry Dart is a little like you: he has wit and imagination, but he is flippant, he has no sympathy. Poor old Jack has plenty of sympathy, but neither wit nor imagination."
"Nevertheless," said I, trying to control my voice, "it is Jack who has won you: the rest of us are nowhere. He is the lucky one of us three."
"Do you think him lucky?" she asked with a trembling, uncertain little laugh. "I am very grateful to him for trying to win me: not many would have done it, knowing all the circumstances of my family—all our faults and humiliations. I am not like other girls, Floyd. They may fall in love, and strive and hope and wait, with poetic dreams and trembling desires, to end in rapturous fulfilment. Not so with me. I must marry early, and marry a man who has wealth, to help those who expect everything from me. My destiny came to me ready-made: I accepted it. The poetry and the romance and the wild wish to love and be loved, as I might be if I could afford to wait, were all put by for hard, practical common sense."