Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/233

Rh "Ah, but the old forms!"

"Those are the most blatant. I mean the swaggering reproductions."

"Oh, but," she pleaded, "we can't all be really old."

"No, we can't, Cornelia. But you can—!" said White-Mason with the frankest appreciation.

She looked up at him from where she sat as he could imagine her looking up at the curate at Bognor. "Thank you, sir! If that's all you want—!"

"It is," he said, "all I want—or almost."

"Then no wonder such a creature as that," she lightly moralized, "won't suit you!"

He bent upon her, for all the weight of his question, his smoothest stare. "You hold she certainly won't suit me?"

"Why, what can I tell about it? Haven't you by this time found out?"

"No, but I think I'm finding." With which he began again to explore.

Miss Rasch immensely wondered. "You mean you don't expect to come to an understanding with her?" And then, as even to this straight challenge he made at first no answer: "Do you mean you give it up?"

He waited some instants more, but not meeting her eyes—only looking again about the room. "What do you think of my chance?"

"Oh," his companion cried, "what has what I think to do with it? How can I think anything but that she must like you?"