“Well, why didn’t you?” she was saying, idly waving her fan and gazing vaguely around the room.

“Why didn’t I—­what?”

“You were trying to decide why you never fell in love with me.”

“So I was,” admitted Arkwright.

“Now if I had had lots of cash,” mocked she.

He reddened, winced.  She had hit the exact reason.  Having a great deal of money, he wanted more—­enough to make the grandest kind of splurge in a puddle where splurge was everything.  “Rather, because you are too intelligent,” drawled he.  “I want somebody who’d fit into my melting moods, not a woman who’d make me ashamed by seeming to sit in judgment on my folly.”

“A man mustn’t have too much respect for a woman if he’s to fall utterly in love with her—­must he?”

Arkwright smiled constrainedly.  He liked cynical candor in men, but only pretended to like it in women because bald frankness in women was now the fashion.  “See,” said he, “how ridiculous I’d feel trying to say sentimental things to you.  Besides, it’s not easy to fall in love with a girl one has known since she was born, and with whom he’s always been on terms of brotherly, quite unsentimental intimacy.”

Rita gave him a look that put this suggestion out of countenance by setting him to thrilling again.  He felt that her look was artful, was deliberate, but he could not help responding to it.  He began to be a little afraid of her, a little nervous about her; but he managed to say indifferently, “And why haven’t you fallen in love with me?”

She smiled.  “It isn’t proper for a well-brought-up girl to love until she is loved, is it?” Her expression gave Grant a faint suggestion of a chill of apprehension lest she should be about to take advantage of their friendship by making a dead set for him.  But she speedily tranquilized him by saying:  “No, my reason was that I didn’t want to spoil my one friendship.  Even a business person craves the luxury of a friend—­and marrying has been my business,” this with a slight curl of her pretty, somewhat cruel mouth.  “To be quite frank, I gave you up as a possibility years ago.  I saw I wasn’t your style.  Your tastes in women are rather—­ coarse.”

Arkwright flushed.  “I do like ’em a bit noisy and silly,” he admitted.  “That sort is so—­so gemuthlich, as the Germans say.”

“Who’s the man you delivered over to old Patsy Raymond?  I see he’s still fast to her.”

“Handsome, isn’t he?”

“Of a sort.”

“It’s Craig—­the Honorable Joshua Craig—­Assistant to the Attorney-General.  He’s from Minnesota.  He’s the real thing.  But you’d not like him.”

“He looks quite—­tame, compared to what he was two years or so ago,” said Rita, her voice as indolent as her slowly-moving eagle feathers.

“Oh, you’ve met him?”

“No—­only saw him.  When I went West with the Burkes, Gus and the husband took me to a political meeting—­one of those silly, stuffy gatherings where some blatant politician bellows out a lot of lies, and a crowd of badly-dressed people listen and swallow and yelp.  Your friend was one of the speakers.  What he said sounded—­” Rita paused for a word.