“And, honestly now, do you pretend that you’d marry a man who had nothing but love to offer you? What has attracted you in the men you thought well of? You say there have been four--or, rather, four and three halves. Has any one of ’em been a poor devil of a nobody?”
Elsie hesitated; in the twilight he saw from the corner of his eye that her upper lip was trembling. They were walking near the tall, white, glistening monument, in the quiet street that skirts the grounds of the White House. “One,” she said, at last, in a low voice. “I didn’t care especially for him. But sometimes I think he really did care for me--he was a wild, sensitive creature.” She looked at Frothingham and smiled. “And when I get in my black moods I’m half sorry I sent him away.”
“But you did send him away, didn’t you?” Frothingham’s expression and tone were satirical, yet sympathetic, too. “And you complain of men for being precisely as you are!”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted.
“I take it for granted the girl who consents to marry me will consent because she wishes to be a Countess.” He drew closer to her--she looked her best in twilight hours, and he succeeded in putting as much tenderness into his voice as was necessary to enable so drawling and indifferent a person to create an impression of sentiment. “If I were walking here with the girl I wished to win, I’d say nothing of sentiment. I’d simply trust to the only thing I have that could possibly induce her to listen to me.”
She glanced shyly up at him--he thought her almost pretty.
“Do you think that would win her?” he asked in a low tone.
“I--don’t--know,” she replied slowly. Her commonplace voice had also been touched with the magic that had transformed her face.
They went on in silence a few minutes, then she spoke in an attempt at her usual voice: “But we must turn back. I’ll have just time to dress for dinner.”
And he decided that he would say no more on the principal subject for several days. He thought he understood how to deal with American girls rather better now. “I’ll give her a chance to walk round the trap,” he thought. And then he reminded himself that it was hardly a trap--wasn’t she getting the better of the bargain? “She’s indulging in a luxury, while I’m after a desperate necessary. And, by Jove, it won’t be easy not to make a face, if I get it--with her.”