"
"Thanks, awfully," she answered, "but Mr. Waldron promised to go round
the course with me, this afternoon, and I'll wait."
The impeccable one grinned fatuously, invited her again to have a
drink--which she declined--and ordered another for himself, with profuse
apologies for drinking alone; apologies which she hardly seemed to
notice.
"Deuced bad form of Wally, I must say," the gilded youth resumed, trying
to make capital for himself, "to leave you in the lurch, this way!"
Silence from Catherine. The would-be interloper, feeling that he was on
the wrong track, took counsel with himself and remained for a moment
immersed in what he imagined to be thought. At last, however, with an
oblique glance at his indifferent companion, he remarked.
"Devilish hard time women have in this world, you know! Don't you
sometimes wish you were a man?"
Her answer flashed back like a rapier:
"No! Do you wish _you_ were?"
Stunned by this "facer," Reginald Van Slyke gasped and stared. That he,
a scion of the Philadelphia Van Slykes, in his own right worth two
hundred million dollars--dollars ground out of the Kensington
carpet-mill slaves by his grandfather--should be thus flouted and put
upon by the daughter of Flint, that parvenu, absolutely floored him.
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