Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/275

264 him; he passed in quick review the girls of his acquaintance—Marion Clark and May Pennington and Helen Foster especially, wondering why he should always have been so indifferent to these three, whom most men found attractive and whom his grandmother had urged upon his attention. It instantly occurred to him now that with any one of them he might pass a profitable and consoling half hour. That afternoon he called upon them, one after another, beginning with Marion Clark, ending with Helen Foster; they were none of them at home. He had brought his mind into a condition receptive for pleasant impressions; with each disappointment at the door he cooled into his attitude of former indifference.

Then, when he was turning away from the last house, he met Marion Clark.

"Oh," she said when he had told her of his unsuccessful attempt, "I'm going home now; please come with me, please! I'll give you a cup of tea."

"Thank you," he said. He turned and walked with her. "I was beginning to lose hope of getting one anywhere."

"I always suspected," she remarked, "that men were a predatory race whose afternoon excursions were prompted by a desire for tea. But I never met one before who so frankly acknowledged it."

"It's the first excursion I've made this year."

"That demands an excuse instead of being one," she answered.

Walking with her, he brightened unconsciously into a gayety of spirit. She was of a robuster type than Lydia Lee, fair-haired, with blue-gray eyes that took one in at a kindly glance and then lighted up humorously if the person pleased her. They were not eyes like Lydia's, which alternated musing with their sprightliness; they expressed a vitality too abundant ever to give place to a deeper, meditative curiosity. A swift practical sense of values which her extravagant speech did not disguise, an eager