She tore away some of the rice paper and lifted the tobacco to her nose, and made a little grimace.

“Do you like to see women smoke?” she asked.

Mr. Spence admitted that there was something cosey about the custom, when it was well done.

“And I imagine,” he added, “that you’d do it well.”

“I’m sure I should make a frightful mess of it,” she protested modestly.

“You do everything well,” he said.

“Even golf?” she inquired mischievously.

“Even golf, for a beginner and—­and a woman; you’ve got the swing in an astonishingly short time.  In fact, you’ve been something of an eye-opener to me,” he declared.  “If I had been betting, I should have placed the odds about twenty to one against your coming from the West.”

This Eastern complacency, although it did not lower Mr. Spence in her estimation, aroused Honora’s pride.

“That shows how little New Yorkers know of the West,” she replied, laughing.  “Didn’t you suppose there were any gentlewomen there?”

“Gentlewomen,” repeated Mr. Spence, as though puzzled by the word, “gentlewomen, yes.  But you might have been born anywhere.”

Even her sense of loyalty to her native place was not strong enough to override this compliment.

“I like a girl with some dash and go to her,” he proclaimed, and there could be no doubt about the one to whom he was attributing these qualities.  “Savoir faire, as the French call it, and all that.  I don’t know much about that language, but the way you talk it makes Mrs. Holt’s French and Susan’s sound silly.  I watched you last night when you were stringing the Vicomte.”

“Oh, did you?” said Honora, demurely.

“You may have thought I was talking to Mrs. Robert,” he said.

“I wasn’t thinking anything about you,” replied Honora, indignantly.  “And besides, I wasn’t I stringing’ the Vicomte.  In the West we don’t use anything like so much slang as you seem to use in New York.”

“Oh, come now!” he exclaimed, laughingly, and apparently not the least out of countenance, “you made him think he was the only pebble on the beach.  I have no idea what you were talking about.”

“Literature,” she said.  “Perhaps that was the reason why you couldn’t understand it.”

“He may be interested in literature,” replied Mr. Spence, “but it wouldn’t be a bad guess to say that he was more interested in stocks and bonds.”

“He doesn’t talk about them, at any rate,” said Honora.

“I’d respect him more if he did,” he announced.  “I know those fellows-they make love to every woman they meet.  I saw him eying you at lunch.”

Honora laughed.

“I imagine the Vicomte could make love charmingly,” she said.

Mr. Spence suddenly became very solemn.

“Merely as a fellow-countryman, Miss Leffingwell—­” he began, when she sprang to her feet, her eyes dancing, and finished the sentence.