Hastings Weare looked up at her, with laughter-brimming eyes.
“Victoria, you're a wonder!” he remarked. “Say, do you remember that tall fellow we met at Humphrey's party, Austen Vane?”
“Yes.”
“I saw him on the street in Ripton the other day, and he came right up and spoke to me. He hadn't forgotten my name. Now, he'd be my notion of a candidate. He makes you feel as if your presence in the world meant something to him.”
“I think he does feel that way,” replied Victoria.
“I don't blame him if he feels that way about you,” said Hastings, who made love openly.
“Hastings,” she answered, “when you get a little older, you will learn to confine yourself to your own opinions.”
“When I do,” he retorted audaciously, “they never make you blush like that.”
“It's probably because you have never learned to be original,” she replied. But Hastings had been set to thinking.
Mrs. Pomfret, with her foresight and her talent for management, had given the Ladies' Auxiliary notice that they were not to go farther forward than the twelfth row. She herself, with some especially favoured ones, occupied a box, which was the nearest thing to being on the stage. One unforeseen result of Mrs. Pomfret's arrangement was that the first eleven rows were vacant, with the exception of one old man and five or six schoolboys. Such is the courage of humanity in general! On the arrival of the candidate, instead of a surging crowd lining the sidewalk, he found only a fringe of the curious, whose usual post of observation was the railroad station, standing silently on the curb. Within, Mr. Tooting's duties as an usher had not been onerous. He met Mr. Crewe in the vestibule, and drew him into the private office.