Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/289

Rh creature for a world of wickedness, a self-complacency hard in tiny, unexpected spots, for which I used sometimes to take her up, but which, I subsequently saw, would have done something for the flatness of her life had they not evaporated with everything else. She was at any rate one of those persons as to whom you don't know whether they might have been attractive if they had been happy, or might have been happy if they had been attractive. If I was a trifle vexed at her not jumping at Marmaduke, it was probably rather less because I expected wonders of him than because I thought she took her own prospect too much for granted. She had made a mistake and, before long, admitted it; yet I remember that when she expressed to me a conviction that he would ask her again, I also thought this highly probable, for in the meantime I had spoken to him. 'She does care for you,' I declared; and I can see at this moment, long ago though it be, his handsome empty young face look, on the words, as if, in spite of itself for a little, it really thought. I didn't press the matter, for he had, after all, no great things to offer; yet my conscience was easier, later on, for having not said less. He had three hundred and fifty a year from his mother, and one of his uncles had promised him something—I don't mean an allowance, but a place, if I recollect, in a business. He assured me that he loved as a man loves—a man of twenty-two!—but once. He said it, at all events, as a man says it but once.

'Well, then,' I replied, 'your course is clear.'

'To speak to her again, you mean?'

'Yes—try it.'

He seemed to try it a moment in imagination; after which, a little to my surprise, he asked: 'Would it be very awful if she should speak to me?'

I stared. 'Do you mean pursue you—overtake you? Ah, if you're running away'

'I'm not running away!'—he was positive as to that, 'But when a fellow has gone so far'