“It’s more than I’d take with you,” said the girl.

“You’ve said that several times.”

He laughed, then looked up at her half humorously, half curiously.

“You would be taking no chances, Geraldine.”

“I’d be taking chances of finding you holding some other girl’s hands within twenty-four hours.  And you know it.”

“Hasn’t anybody ever held yours?”

Displeasure tinted her cheeks a deeper red, but she merely shrugged her shoulders.

It was true that in the one evanescent and secret affair of her first winter she had not escaped the calf-like transports of Bunbury Gray.  She had felt, if she had not returned them, the furtively significant pressure of men’s hands in the gaiety and whirl of things; ardent and chuckle-headed youth had declared itself in conservatories and in corners; one impetuous mauling from a smitten Harvard boy of eighteen had left her furiously vexed with herself for her passive attitude while the tempest passed.  True, she had vigorously reproved him later.  She had, alas, occasion, during her first season, to reprove several demonstrative young men for their unconventionally athletic manner of declaring their suits.  She had been far more severe with the humble, unattractive, and immobile, however, than with the audacious and ornamental who had attempted to take her by storm.  A sudden if awkward kiss followed by the fiery declaration of the hot-headed disturbed her less than the persistent stare of an enamoured pair of eyes.  As a child the description of an assault on a citadel always interested her, but she had neither sympathy nor interest in a siege.

Now, musing there in the sunlight on the events of her first winter, she became aware that she had been more or less instructed in the ways of men; and, remembering, she lifted her disturbed eyes to inspect this specimen of a sex which often perplexed but always interested her.

“What are you smiling about, Duane?” she asked defiantly.

“Your arraignment of me when half the men in town have been trying to marry you all winter.  You’ve made a reputation for yourself, too, Geraldine.”

“As what?” she asked angrily.

“A head-twister.”

“Do you mean a flirt?”

“Oh, Lord!  Only the French use that term now.  But that’s the idea, Geraldine.  You are a born one.  I fell for the first smile you let loose on me.”

“You seem to have been a sort of general Humpty Dumpty for falls all your life, Duane,” she said with dangerous sweetness.

“Like that immortal, I’ve had only one which permanently shattered me.”

“Which was that, if you please?”

“The fall you took out of me.”

“In other words,” she said disdainfully, “you are beginning to make love to me again.”

“No....  I was in love with you.”

“You were in love with yourself, young man.  You are on such excellent terms with yourself that you sympathise too ardently with any attractive woman who takes the least and most innocent notice of you.”