"That will be about all from you," she snapped at him, using back-stage language. "I'm picking my own friends these days. And you lay off from handing out your little digs at him across the table meal-times. He may not be on to you--he's too decent and polite himself to suspect anybody else of trying to razz him on the sly--but I'm on. So I'm serving notice on you to quit it because if you don't, the first thing you know you'll be in a jam with me. I know how to handle your kind. I was raised that way. I guess it's a kind of a tip-off on the way I was raised that I had to wait until I met a man who'll be eighty his next birthday before I met somebody who knows how to treat a girl like she was a lady."
Tobe, drawing off, flung a parting retort at her.
"Say, kiddo, how did you find out what it feels like to be a lady?"
"I never found out," she said. "I never knew before. But I'm taking lessons now."
That precisely was what she was doing--taking lessons. For her it was a new experience to be on terms of confidence with a man holding her in somewhat the affectionate regard which he might have bestowed upon a daughter, did he have one. Most of the men with whom she had come in contact before this coveted to possess her. Here at last was a relationship in which the carnal played no part; she somehow sensed that had he been in his prime instead of, as he was, teetering toward an onrushing senility, Captain Teal, believing her virginal--she grimaced bitterly to herself at that--yet would have shown her no fleshly side to his nature. In these present environments he was as much out of place as Sir Roger de Coverley would be at a Tammany clambake, but the thing she liked about him was that for all his age and mental creakiness he nevertheless created out of himself an atmosphere of innate chivalry in which he moved and by which he went insulated against all unchaste and vulgarizing contacts. Not that she put this conception of him in any such words as these. But she was a woman reared in a business where observation counts, and she could feel things which she might not always express.
Toward him her own attitude rapidly became more and more protecting as a thwarted maternal complex in her--that same mothering instinct which in one shape or another expresses itself in every woman--was roused and quickened. She was pleased now that she had not obeyed an impulse which had come to her more than once in that first week of their acquaintance to confess to him that she was an imposter masquerading under false colors, making believe to be something she had never been. Confessing might have eased her conscience, but it would have wrecked his faith in her and surely it would have marred their partnership, might even have smashed it up entirely. And she didn't want that to happen. Oddly, she felt that with each passing day she was going deeper and deeper into debt to the Captain.