"Then how am I to become returning officer for Keeton?"
"That's quite another thing. That depends on me."
"On you, Mr. St. Paul?"
"On me. Just listen." St. Paul had been seated in his favorite attitude of careless indolence in a very low chair, so low that his long legs seemed as if they stretched half way across the room. His position, joined with an expression of self-satisfied lawlessness in his face, might have whimsically suggested a sort of resemblance to Milton's arch fiend "stretched out huge at length," in one of his less malign humors. He now jumped up and stood on the hearth-rug, with his back to the fireplace, his slightly stooping shoulders only seeming to make him look taller than otherwise, because they might set people wondering as to the height he would have reached if he had only stood erect and made the most of his inches. His blue eyes had quite a sparkle of excited interest in them, and his prematurely bald forehead looked oddly infantine over these eyes and that keen, fearless mouth.
"Look here, Miss Grey, it's all in your hands. You know both these fellows, don't you?"
"Both what fellows?"
"These fellows who want to get in for Keeton. You know them both. Now which of them do you want to win?"
"What can it matter which way my wishes go—if they went any way?"
"How like a woman! How very like a woman!" and he laughed.
"What is like a woman? I know when a man says anything is like a woman, he means to say that it is ridiculous."