The girl with the big brown eyes was still smiling in an amused sort of way, but Ellis showed no resentment. He knew that to her he was a strange animal––very new and very peculiar. He did not do as a lesser man would have done, pretend knowledge of things unknown, but looked the girl frankly in the eyes.
“Pardon me, but it was all rather sudden,” he explained. The red had left his face now. “I’ve only known a few women––and they were not––of your class. This is Mr. Burr’s joke, not mine.”
The smile faded from the girl’s face. She 333 met him on his own ground, and they were friends.
“Don’t take it that way,” she protested, quickly. “I see, he’s been telling you of Washington’s Mary Philipse. It merely happens that my name is the same. I’m simply a friend visiting here. Can’t I show you the house? It’s rather interesting.”
If Ellis was a novelty to the woman, she was equally so to him. Unconventionality reigned in that house, and they were together an hour. Never before in his life had Ellis learned so much, nor caught so many glimpses of things beyond, in an equal length of time. His idea of woman had been trite, a little vague. He had no ideal; he had simply accepted, without question, the one specimen he had known well.
In an uncertain sort of way he had thought of the sex as being invariably creatures of unquestioned virtue, but of mind somewhat defective; who were to be respected and protected, loved perhaps with the love animals know; but of such an one as this he had no conception.
Here was a woman, younger than he, whose unconscious familiarity with things, which to 334 him lay hidden in the dark land of ignorance, affected him like a stimulant. A woman who had read and travelled and thought and felt; whose mind met him even in the unhesitating confidence of knowledge––it is no wonder that he was in a dream. It turned his little world upside down: so brief a time had elapsed since he had cursed woman for bringing crime into his life, in the narrowness of his ignorance thinking them all alike. He was in the presence of a superior, and his own smallness came over him like a flood.
He mentally swore, then and there, with a tightening of his jaw that meant finality, that he would raise himself to her plane. The girl saw the look, and wondered at it.
That night, at parting, the eyes of the two met. A moment passed––and another, and neither spoke a word. Then a smile broke over the face of Mary Philipse, and it was answered on the face of the man. Equals had met equals. At last the girl held out her hand.
“Call again, please,” she requested. “Good-night.”