“Yes, you give happiness.  You scatter it, all over the place,” he went on, groping an instant after the right words.

“Cousin Jimmy used to say,” she laughed back, “that I had a sunny temper.”

“That’s it—­that’s what I meant,” he replied eagerly; and she was impressed again by his utter inability to make light conversation.  When he was once started, when he had lost himself in his subject, she knew that he could speak both fluently and convincingly; but she realized that he simply couldn’t talk unless he had something to say.  In order to put him at his ease again, she remarked with pleasant firmness:  “Do you know there is something about you that reminds me of my Cousin Jimmy.  It gives me almost a cousinly feeling for you.”

She had the air of expecting him to be interested, but he met it with the rather vague interrogation:  “Cousin Jimmy?”

“The cousin who always came to our help when we were in trouble.  We used to say that if the bread didn’t rise, mother sent for Cousin Jimmy.”

Though he laughed readily enough, she could see that his attention was still wandering.  “I never had a cousin,” he returned after a pause, “or a relation of any sort, for that matter.”

His voice was curiously distant, and she was conscious of a slight shock, as if she had run against one of the hard places in his character.  “Well, I’ve done my best,” she thought impatiently.  “If he doesn’t want to be friends he needn’t be.”  Then, with a change of manner, she observed flippantly:  “Sometimes one’s relatives are useful and sometimes they’re not.”  Really, he was impossibly heavy except in a crisis; and one could scarcely be expected to produce crises in order to put him thoroughly at his ease.

As he made no response to her trite remark, she, also, fell silent, while they turned into Twenty-third Street, and began the long walk to Ninth Avenue.  Once or twice, glancing inquiringly into his face, which wore a preoccupied look, she wondered if he were thinking of Alice.  Then, as the silence became suddenly oppressive, she ventured warily in the effort to dispel it:  “I hope you are not disturbed about anything?”

“Disturbed?” He turned to her with a start.  “No, I was only wondering if you knew how much your friendship would mean to me.”

It was out at last, and confirmed once more in her knowledge of men, she retorted gaily:  “How can I know if you won’t take the trouble to tell me?” After all, she reflected cheerfully, the education she had derived from George and Judge Crowborough, though lacking in the higher branches, was fundamentally sound.  All men were alike in one thing at least—­they invariably disappointed one’s expectations.

“I’ve been trying to tell you for a quarter of an hour,” he answered, “and I didn’t know how to put it.”

“But at last you didn’t have to put it at all,” she said laughingly; “it simply put itself, didn’t it?”