“Oh, if you take me that way——”
She interrupted airily. “I’m trying to make up my mind whether to take you at all.”
“You certainly have a direct way of getting at things.”
He studied appreciatively her piquant, tilted face; the long, graceful lines of her slender, perfect figure. “I take it you don’t want the sentimental reason for my wishing to marry you, though I find that amply justified. But if you want another, you must still look to yourself for it. My business leads me to appreciate values correctly. When I desire you to sit at the head of my table, to order my house, my judgment justifies itself. I have a fancy always for the best. When I can’t gratify it I do without.”
“Thank you.” She made him a gay little mock curtsy “I had heard you were no carpet-knight, Mr. Ridgway. But rumor is a lying jade, for I am being told—am I not?—that in case I don’t take pity on you, the lone future of a celibate stretches drear before you.”
“Oh, certainly.”
Having come to the end of that passage, she tried another. “A young man told me yesterday you were a fighter. He said he guessed you would stand the acid. What did he mean?”
Ridgway was an egoist from head to heel. He could voice his own praises by the hour when necessary, but now he side-stepped her little trap to make him praise himself at second-hand.
“Better ask him.”
“ARE you a fighter, then?”