with as much detachment as was possible, the whole spirit of
the adventure. But when she heard him, as she put it, "telling on
her," laying bare to her mother all the walks they had taken together,
visits to restaurants and rambles through the streets and the parks,
what he had said to her on this occasion and on that, and her remarks
on such and such a matter, she could not visualize him save as a
malignant and uncultivated person; and when he tacitly suggested that
she was as eager for matrimony as he was, and so put upon her the
horrible onus of rejecting him before a second person, she closed her
mind and her ears against him. She refused to listen, although her
perceptions admitted the trend of his speech. His words droned heavily
and monotonously to her as through dull banks of fog. She made up her
mind that if she were asked any questions by either of them she would
not reply, and that she would not look at either of them, and then she
thought that she would snap and stamp her feet and say that she hated
him, that he had looked down on her because she worked for his aunt,
that he had meanly been ashamed of and cut her because she was poor,
that he had been going with another girl all the time he was going
with her and that he only pursued her in order to annoy her, that she
didn't love him, that she didn't even like him, that, in fact, she
disliked him heartily. She wished to say all these things in one
whirling outcry, but feared that before she had rightly begun she might
become abashed, or, worse, might burst into tears and lose all the
dignity which she meant to preserve in his presence for the purpose of
showing to him in the best light exactly what he was losing.

But the big man had come to the end of his speech. He made a few
attempts to begin anew on the desirability of such a union for both of
them, and the happiness it would give him if Mrs. Makebelieve would
come to live with them when they were married. He refused to let it
appear that there was any doubt as to Mary's attitude in the matter,
for up to the moment he came to their door he had not doubted her
willingness himself. Her late avoidance of him he had put down to mere
feminine tactics which leads on by holding off. The unwilling person
he had been assured was himself--he stooped to her, and it was only
after a severe battle that he had been able to do it. The astonishment
and disapproval of his relatives and friends at such a step was very
e