"I?" said the young man, hastily. "Oh, I fear I can offer nothing to rival Miss Angela's attractions just now."
"Does it look as serious as that? Well," she said, with a sort of determined friendliness, "all the more reason that I should like to have your help."
He hardly repressed a sardonic laugh. "Are you asking me to help _you_?"
"Not a thing, of course. I wasn't certain I'd understood you, that was all."
But it appeared that the idea of helping this young woman had ceased to have the smallest pulling power now. Rather, there was bitterness in the thought that she still seemed ready to use him when she could.
He said, with savage urbanity: "Perhaps you might get Donald a motor-cycle, and encourage him to practice up as a Speed Demon."
The remark was received in entire silence. It was probably true that she literally did not understand him. All the same, his displeasure grew.
"But really," he continued sweetly, "if these two young people are so strongly attracted to each other--love at first sight, who knows?--really, is it judicious to interfere? Don't you believe in elective affinities at all?"
"As a matter of fact, you know, Donald was greatly attracted to Helen, at first sight. And as for Angela, I'm certain--"
"You see," he interrupted, stung beyond all calculations, "my personal idea is that Miss Angela would probably make him a more suitable wife."
That unwisdom made everything worse at once; for Mary, after one glance at him and a stare out the window, said in a changed, "diplomatic" tone: "Well, I mustn't let you misunderstand me, at any rate. You know, I've agreed with you perfectly, all along, that she's thoroughly charming.... And, by the way, she likes _you_ so much, too!"
"In fact, she thinks you're much more attractive than Donald--or did, just a little while ago. I have her word for it. So if she's seeing a good deal of Donald just now, I don't believe it's from affinity, necessarily!"
"She was inquiring about you the last time I saw her--saying that she never saw you now, asking if you ever spoke of her to me, and so on. I told her, of course, you did, and repeated some of the compliments you paid her--"
Again he interrupted her, now with some slipping of his mask. It was true, to be just, that Mary Wing knew nothing of his long struggles to elude the Fordette. Nevertheless, her patent desire to hand him back to it, merely by way of furthering a little her plans for Donald, seemed somehow the last straw. A friendly reward for magnanimity this! And it may be some touch of purely male chagrin enhanced the philosophic anger, that any woman should be thus eager to pass on him, Charles, to another.