“Hello, Madge!” he cried. “Still sore?”
“I’ve never been ‘sore’ at you, Gordon. That’s a coarse and unkind thing to say!”
“Well, you swallowed all the guff Aunt Grace handed you about me.”
“Please don’t talk so, Gordon. If you haven’t been—well, interesting, it’s because you haven’t seemed to me to live up to the best that’s in you.”
“You didn’t talk that way the first time we met, Madge—when Aunt Grace was showing me the gate. You seemed like a regular girl, for a time. Then right off you got stiff—stiff as froze mutton.”
“You didn’t act very gentlemanly around my home afterward, Gordon. Your behavior displeased my mother. I couldn’t help charging that displeasure against you.”
“You made me feel for a time, Madge, as if you’d give a fellow a chance. Then you turned the glassy stare on me like—like—all the rest.” Gordon said this in a hard, dry self-pity which he knew intuitively how to employ with deadly effect on Madelaine’s type of femininity.
“Mother asked you not to try to see me or find out where I’d started in school. She begged you to go away and leave me alone. And you haven’t paid the slightest regard to her. Is that honorable? What ‘chance’ do you want?”
“What right did she have to ask it? She flung me a dare. Because I took it and smoked you out, she’s sore. And she’s gypping my game—with you.”
“Just what is your ‘game,’ Gordon?”