“By this time you’d come back, but he didn’t even turn though I kept my off-eye alive on you. ‘That is—admission,’ he said, talking very low now. ‘We have started at the end, and defeated all the weary preliminaries.’ ‘Doesn’t it all amount to the same, though?’ I said; ‘for we’ll have to work back.’ ‘No, it’s not the same,’ he said, ‘for at the end I do not greatly care to turn back for my sake. I shall for yours, if you will; but I somehow feel, that to work back is something for which you, too, do not greatly care.’” “What did he mean?” Joy interrupted. “How could you follow all this, Jerry?” “Follow what he says? I’d get his drift if he made love to me in Latin! He was taking me at my face value, Joy—which wasn’t right, God knows—and dropping the remark in passing that he wouldn’t expect me to do the same thing with him, although he sort of thought that I would anyhow!” “It’s so—so strange.” “Strange! It’s—as he says—a dream! How did he happen to be your cousin, anyway? Didn’t you ever know he was?” Joy explained, and the two fell into a silent labyrinth of wonder. Jerry walked restlessly about the room. “And he’s still unmarried, though every woman that passed his way must have made a grab for him!” “He looks to me like a man who has always had his way—with women,” said Joy, trembling to break in upon Jerry’s exultation, but fearful memory driving the words out of her. “What if he was—just bandying words, Jerry? And thought you were too? Or didn’t care—what you thought? The last kind I know——You admitted too much, right off like that, it seems to me.” Jerry laughed, running her fingers through her hair with a satisfied sigh. “Don’t you think I’ve been through enough sieges of men and their lines, in my life, not to be able to tell a real thing from a line? The real thing just thumps out. You never can mistake it. A line can be finely spun, but it can’t thump. The real thing and a line can have the same words—that’s where we women get fooled—it’s manner and looks you’ve got to watch.” “He’s awfully cynical about women,” said Joy. “And his face, Jerry—it’s so full of—so—experienced.” “Can you imagine me getting along well with anyone who was—not?” Jerry questioned; and then smiled again. Joy started. Her smile held in it an echo of Mabel’s peculiar radiance. “Cynical! His face looks like a kid’s who has asked for a stick of candy and been stuffed with the whole candy store.” She began to slide out of her clothes. “And he doesn’t know—that I’m Galatea! Can you tie that?” “You—don’t have to tell him,” and Joy watched her from the corner of one eye as she brushed her hair. “He doesn’t care about working back—he’s said so—you never have to tell him a—thing.”