“What do I want to listen to him for?” Johnny’s eyes looked down at her with no softening of his anger.  “Good golly!  Do you think your dad’s got the only brain in the world?  How do men run their affairs, and get rich, that never heard of him, do you suppose?  I don’t want to mock your dad—­he’s all right in his own field, and a smart man and all that.  But he don’t know the flying game, and his advice wouldn’t be worth the breath he’d use giving it.  Perhaps I am conceited and swell-headed and a few other things, but I am perfectly willing to take a chance on my own judgment for awhile yet, anyway.  When I do need advice, I’ll know where to go.”

“To Bland Halliday, I suppose!” Mary V took away her arm and stood back from him.  “You’d take a tramp’s advice before you would my father’s, would you?” She pressed her lips together, seeming to hold back with difficulty a storm of reproaches.

“I would, where flying is concerned.”  Johnny’s lips spelled anger to match her own.  “He knows the game, and your father doesn’t.  And just because Bland’s playing hard luck is no reason why you need call him names.  Give the devil his due, anyway.”

“I just perfectly ache to do it!” cried Mary V.  “He wouldn’t be talking you into all kinds of crazy things—­”

“Crazy because they don’t happen to appeal to you,” Johnny flung back.  “Oh, well, what’s the use of talking?  You don’t seem to get the right angle on things, is all.”  He busied himself with a cigarette, his face, that had been so boyishly eager while he told her his plan, gone gloomy with the self-pity of one who feels himself misunderstood.

Mary V had gone back to her hammock and was lying with one arm thrown up across the cushion, her face concealed behind it.  She, too, felt miserably misunderstood.  Flighty she was, spoiled and impulsive, but beneath it all she had her father’s practical strain of hard sense.  Mary V had grown older in the past three days.  She had faced some bitter possibilities and had done a good deal of sober thinking.  She felt now that Johnny was carried away by the fascination of flying, and that Bland’s companionship was the worst thing in the world for him.  She was hurt at Johnny’s lack of consideration for her, at his complete absorption in himself and his own plans.  She wanted him to “settle down,” and be content with loving her and with being loved—­to be satisfied with prosperity that carried no element of danger.

Moreover, that he had not troubled to send her any message but had deliberately gone flying off in the opposite direction with Bland, regardless of what she might think or suffer, filled her with something more bitter than mere girlish resentment.  Johnny was like one under a spell, hypnotized by his own air castles and believing them very real.