"She is beautiful, too--very beautiful." This very frankly.

"Have you talked with her?" asked I.

"Yes, a little this morning, for the first time. She did not speak much,
however." Here Miss Treherne paused, and then added meditatively: "Do
you know, she impressed me as having singular frankness and singular
reserve as well? I think I admired it. There is no feeling in her
speech, and yet it has great candour. I never before met any one like
her. She does not wear her heart upon her sleeve, I imagine."

A moment of irony came over me; that desire to say what one really does
not believe (a feminine trait), and I replied: "Are both those articles
necessary to any one? A sleeve?--well, one must be clothed. But a
heart?--a cumbrous thing, as I take it."

Belle Treherne turned, and looked me steadily in the eyes for an instant,
as if she had suddenly awakened from abstraction, and slowly said, while
she drew back slightly: "Dr. Marmion, I am only a girl, I know, and
inexperienced, but I hoped most people of education and knowledge of
life were free from that kind of cynicism to be read of in books." Then
something in her thoughts seemed to chill her words and manner, and her
father coming up a moment after, she took his arm, and walked away with a
not very cordial bow to me.

The fact is, with a woman's quick intuition, she had read in my tone
something suggestive of my recent experience with Mrs. Falchion. Her
fine womanliness awoke; the purity of her thoughts, rose in opposition to
my flippancy and to me; and I knew that I had raised a prejudice not easy
to destroy.