No reply.
“You have an interesting book there, Miss Barrington?”
“I don’t know—I’m trying to find out,” replied Miss Barrington, with calm but ineffectual rudeness.
“Um—delightful place to read! Nice day, too.”
No answer.
Mr. Hemenway looked down approvingly at the lowered lids of the girl’s eyes and, blinded by his vast conceit, mistook the flush of annoyance for the blush of maidenly shyness. “I never did like a girl to fling herself in my face,” he mused, coming a little nearer.
“Well,” he said aloud, “if you have no objections, Miss Barrington, I’ll just stop a bit with you and enjoy this breeze,” and he cast himself at her feet in careful imitation of the attitude he had seen the fussy man with glasses assume only the week before.
Miss Barrington was speechless with indignation. Her first instinct was to spring to her feet, but the paralysis of amazement that had struck her dumb had also rendered her, for the moment, incapable of motion. A sudden determination to “teach the man a lesson and stop once for all this insufferable persecution”—as her mind expressed it—followed, and she remained passively quiet.
There was an uncomfortable silence that to any man but Hemenway would have proved embarrassing.