d Sylvia, very much astonished.

"There!" he said, wilfully mistaking her meaning, and smiling faintly,
"I am such an old gentleman that I'm perfectly negligible to a young
lady. She doesn't even notice or not whether I look at her, and think
about her."

A few years before this Sylvia would have burst out impetuously, "Oh
yes, I have! I've wondered awfully what made you so indifferent," but
now she kept this reflection to herself and merely said, "What in the
world did you fancy was 'forbidding' you?"

"Honor!" said Morrison, with a note of mock solemnity. "_Honor!_
Victoria was so evidently snatching at you as a last hope for Arnold.
She gave me to understand that everybody else but Arnold was to be
strictly non-existent. But now that Arnold has found a character
beautifully and archaically simple to match his own primitive needs, I
don't see why I shouldn't enjoy a little civilized talk with you. In
any case, it was absurd to think of _you_ for Arnold. It merely shows
how driven poor Victoria was!"

Sylvia tried to speak lightly, although she was penetrated with
pleasure at this explanation of his holding aloof. "Oh, _I_ like
Arnold very much. I always have. There's something ... something sort
of _touching_ about Arnold, don't you think? Though I must say that
I've heard enough about the difference between training quail dogs
and partridge dogs to last me the rest of my life. But that's rather
touching too, his not knowing what to do with himself but fiddle
around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep
him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough.
Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he
have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild
country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy
he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his way through
darkest Thibet." She meditated over this hypothesis for a moment and
then added with a nod of her head, "Oh yes, I like Arnold ever so much
... one kind of 'liking.'"

"Of course you like him," assented the older man, who had been
watching her as she talked, and whose manner now, as he took up the
word himself, resembled that of an exquisitely adroit angler, casting
out the lightest, the most feathery, the most perfectly controlled of
dry-flies. "You're too intelligent not to like everybody who's not
base--and Arnold's not base. And he 'likes' you. If you