Chapter 7

By the time they were on their way home, the moon, no longer dodging behind chimneys, had swaggered into the open. It was a hardened old highwayman of a moon, red in the face and very full, and it declared with every flashing beam that it was no respecter of persons, and that it intended doing all the mischief possible down there in the little world of men.

Miss Eleanor Bartlett was its first victim. In the white twilight she forgot the social gap that lay between her and the youth beside her. She ceased to observe the size and roughness of his hands, but noted instead the fine breadth of his shoulders. She concerned herself no longer with his verbal lapses, but responded instead to his glowing confidence that everybody was as sincere and well intentioned as himself. She discovered what the more sophisticated Rose had perceived at once—that Quinby Graham “had a way with him,” a beguiling, sympathetic way that made one tell him things that one really didn’t mean to tell any one. Of course, it was partly due to the fact that he asked such outrageously direct questions, questions that no one in her most intimate circle of friends would dare to ask. And the queer part of it was that she was answering them.

Before she realized it she was launched on a full recital of her woes, her thwarted ambition to go on the stage, her grandmother’s tyranny, the indignity of being sent back to a school from which she had run away six months before. She flattered herself that she was stating her case for the sole purpose of getting an unprejudiced outsider’s unbiased opinion; but from the inflection of her voice and the expressive play of eyes and lips it was evident that she was deriving some pleasure from the mere act of thus dramatizing her woes before that wholly sympathetic audience of one.

It was not until they reached the Eastern Parkway and were speeding toward the twinkling lights of the city that their little bubble of intimacy, blown in the moonlight, was shattered by a word.

“Say, Miss Eleanor,” Quin blurted out unexpectedly, “do you like me?”

The question, together with the fact that he had dared used her first name, brought her up with a start.

“Like you?” she repeated in her most conventional tone, “Why, of course. Whatever made you think I didn’t?”

“I didn’t think that. But—do you like me enough to let me come to see you when you come back?”

Now, a romantically wounded hero receiving favors in a hospital is one thing, and an unknown discharged soldier asking them is quite another. The very thought of Quinby Graham presenting himself as a caller, and the comments that would follow made Eleanor shy away from the subject in alarm.

“Oh, you’ll be on the other side of the world by the time I get back,” she said lightly.

“Not me. Not if there’s a chance of seeing you again.”

A momentary diversion followed, during which Eleanor fancied there was something wrong with the radiator and expatiated at length on her preference for air-cooled cars.

Quin listened patiently. A gentleman more versed in social subtleties would have accepted the hint and said no more. But he was still laboring under the error that language was invented to reveal rather than to conceal thought.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, when Eleanor paused for breath.

“What question?”

“About my coming to see you.”

She took shelter in a subterfuge.

“I told you that the family was horrid to everybody that came to see me. To tell you the truth, I don’t think you would be comfortable.”

“I’m not afraid of ‘em,” Quin insisted fatuously. “I’d butt in anywhere to get to see you.”

Eleanor’s eyes dropped under his gaze.

“You don’t know my grandmother,” she said; “and, what is much more important, she doesn’t know you.”