"Kinder? But how could I?" He felt that her rage was making her
unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to you."
It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet--" but
he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all
perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here
she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of
indifference and falsehood. And after all, what had they done to her? No
one had been openly rude. Nothing had been said, he was sure, absolutely
nothing. It had been a "charity entertainment," and the young people of
his set had merely left her alone, that was all. The affair had been far
from exclusive--for the enterprising ladies of the Beech Tree Day
Nursery had prudently preferred a long subscription list to a limited
social circle--and in a gathering so obscurely "mixed" there were,
without doubt, a number of Gideon Vetch's admirers. Was it maliciously
arranged by Fate that Patty Vetch's social success should depend upon
the people who had elected her father to office?

"As if that mattered!"

Her scorn of his subterfuge, her mocking defiance of the sacred formula
to which he deferred, awoke in him an unfamiliar and pleasantly piquant
sensation. Through it all he was conscious of the inner prick and sting
of his disapprobation, as if the swift attraction had passed into a
mental aversion.

"As if that mattered!" he echoed gaily, "as if that mattered at all!"

Her face changed in the twilight, and it seemed to him that he saw her
for the first time with the peculiar vividness that came only in dreams
or in the hidden country within his mind. The sombre arch of the sky,