"The man with her is an oaf. He has a loose mouth that wabbles when he opens it to pick his teeth." "So you think that though you may not snatch her bodily, you may make her wish to be with you instead of with him, and that the wish will lie fallow in her heart. Dick, you are a student of human nature," Ellery said, half amused, half irritated. "I dare say he is a gentleman at heart. Oafs always are." "What you really do," Ellery continued, "is to make her uncomfortable and conscious of his clothes and his sprawl. She flushed when she saw you, and she has been sitting stiffly ever since." "Oh, drop it, Norris." Ellery shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know what you want to do it for," he said. "You're a queer combination, Dick, of the whole-souled reformer and the abject goose." "Nothing inconsistent about being a philanthropist and a philogynist. By Jove! She's pretty in her _malaise_, pink, and pecking like a little wren at her oaf. Ellery, it's a brute of a shame that such as she should be cast before him--she, a fine lacy creature who shows her breeding through it all." "How much are you in earnest?" "There you go again!" Dick turned on his friend with a kind of exasperation. "You belong to that period of social development when they ask a man's intentions if he looks twice at the girl he dances with. I don't have to be in earnest, thank Heaven! But when I get a chance to look at anything so lovely as that girl, I mean to do it, just as I look at a flower or a picture. I don't mean to lose all the delicious froth of life. Do you happen to know her first name?" "Lena," answered Ellery shortly. "Lena! It's a delicate fragile little name--not meant for a girl who has to plug her way through life. Her real name is Andromeda, poor child--chained to the rock and momently expecting the jaws of poverty." "You know, Dick, the attention that seems like a trifle to you, with a life full of interests, may look like a serious affair to her." "See here, old man, you needn't be so snippy. Must I confine my philanthropy to the old and ugly to keep it above suspicion? I'm just so far interested in this, and no more, that I'm sorry for that little girl, and if I saw a chance, I'd do her a good turn, as I pass along; and if I didn't think more of you than of any other man, I wouldn't give you the satisfaction of rendering so much of an account of myself." Ellery was silent and looked at the river with its whirlpools, at the cliffs, gray with stone and pale green with May, and sometimes at Dick, who leaned forward with his chin in his hand, apparently absorbed in thought, but occasionally shooting a glance at Lena who laughed and chattered with Mr. Nolan in a sort of intermittent fever.