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We none of us can expect to marry Eve before the Fall now; perhaps we have got over wanting to." "You are very perverse, my dear. But you will get over that." "Don't take away my last defence, mother." Verrian began to go rather regularly to the Andrews house, or, at least, he was accused of doing it by Miss Macroyd when, very irregularly, he went one day to see her.
"A girl," Miss Macroyd continued, "might do it by posing effectively for amateur photography. Or doing something original in dramatics or pantomimics or recitation but very original, because chic people are critical.
One after another they confronted and questioned the oracle with increasing sincerity. Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, "Hadn't you better take your chance and stop this flow of fatuity, Mr. Verrian?" "I'm afraid I should be fatuous, too," he said. "But you?" "Oh, thank you, I don't believe in ghosts, though this seems to be a very pretty one very graceful, I mean.
"Of course," Bushwick assented, and then he added, with a bonhomie really so amiable that a man with even an unreasonable grudge could hardly resist it, "If you call it dispassionate." Verrian could not help laughing. "Well, passionate, then. I don't know why it should be so confoundedly vexatious. But somehow I would have chosen Miss Macroyd Is she specially dear to you?" "Not the least!"
Westangle, the second of her name, never was in clothespins." Miss Macroyd laughed all through her talk, and she was in a final burst of laughing when the train slowed into Stamford. There a girl came into the car trailing her skirts with a sort of vivid debility and overturning some minor pieces of hand-baggage which her draperies swept out of their shelter beside the chairs.
"I'm sure you'll enjoy it." "Do you mean that I'm never impulsive?" "I don't think you look it." "If you had seen me an hour ago you would have said I was very impulsive. I think I may have exhausted myself in that direction, however. I feel the impulse failing me now." His impulse really had failed him. It had been to tell Miss Macroyd about his adventure and frankly trust her with it.
"And it isn't Boston," Miss Macroyd tried again on the same string, and this time she got her laugh. The girl who had first spoken remained, at the risk of pneumonia, with her arm prettily lifted against the open sash, for a moment peering out, and then reported, in dashing it down with a shiver, "It seems to be a very soft snow."
He had been so ignorant of such circles as to suppose they would have some use for him as a brilliant young author; and though he was outwearing this illusion, he still would not have liked a girl like Julia Macroyd, whose family, if not smart, was at least chic, to know that he had come to the house with a professional mistress of the revels, until Miss Shirley should have approved herself chic, too.
Or if she had a gift for getting up things that would show other girls off; or suggesting amusements; but that would be rather in the line of swell people, who are not good at getting up things and are glad of help." "I see, I see!" Verrian said, eagerly. But he walked along looking down at the snow, and not meeting the laughing glance that Miss Macroyd cast at his face. "Well?"
"The missiles of the assailants are to be very soft snowballs, hardly more than mere clots, so that nobody can be hurt in the assault, but the defenders may repel the assailants with harder snowballs." "Oh," Miss Macroyd protested, "this is consulting the weakness of our sex." "In the fury of the onset we'll forget it," Verrian reassured her. "Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?" she asked.
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