"I'm sure you always
wish to be nice," she said at last. The words and tone
were alike gracious, but he detected in them somewhere
a perfunctory note.
"Oh--nice!" he echoed, in a sudden stress of impatience
with the word. "Damn being 'nice'! Anybody can be
'nice.' I'm thinking of something ten thousand times
bigger than being 'nice.'"
"I withdraw the word immediately--unreservedly," she put in,
with a smile in which he read that genial mockery he knew
so well.
"You laugh at me--whenever I try to talk seriously,"
he objected.
"I laugh?" she queried, with an upward glance of demurely
simulated amazement. "Impossible! I assure you I've
forgotten how."
"Ah, now we get to it!" he broke out, with energy.
"You're really feeling about it just as I am.
You're not satisfied with what we're doing--with the
life we're leading--any more than I am. I see that,
plain enough, now. I didn't dream of it before. Somehow I
got the idea that you were enjoying it immensely--the
greenhouses and gardens and all that sort of thing.
And do you know who it was that put me right--that told
me you hated it?"
"Oh, don't let us talk of him!" Edith exclaimed, swiftly.
Thorpe laughed. "You're wrong. It wasn't your father.
I didn't see him. No--it was my sister. She's never seen you,
but all the same she knew enough to give me points.
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