“I have no war with you,” she replied, with no interest. “I simply don’t like you. Why should we talk about it?” “There’ll be no trouble on that score,” said Jim, smiling. He rather enjoyed her acerbity. “You see, I’m not exactly fond of you. But we’re living under the same roof and eating at the same table. If we could agree on a truce or a pretense that we are not distasteful to each other—merely while we’re in the house—it might make Mrs. Stickney’s life a bit more joyous. I assure you that if I had known you lived here I shouldn’t have intruded.” “Mrs. Stickney has a right to take whatever boarders she chooses.” “I’m not asking you to be friends—” Jim stopped. He was conscious of that feeling of sudden determination, of that urge to quick action which had come upon him several times since his arrival in Diversity, of that spirit which had earned for him among his workmen the name of Sudden Jim. So he cut off his sentence and started another. “I’m going to be your friend, whether you like it or not. Possibly I shall even like you. You seem to need friends, if what you said to me the other day is an indication of what is really going on inside you. The matter is out of your hands. You said absurd things; things dangerous for any young woman to say, even if she knows in her heart they’re ridiculous.” “They were not absurd. I meant them. You had no business to be there to hear—to know. You let me talk when I was unstrung. You spied—it amounted to that.” “Let it stand that way. I do know and I’m going to meddle. You hate Diversity because it isn’t New York City. You talk recklessly to a stranger. The sum of the matter is that you are steering for a big unpleasantness. If you don’t like things as they are, what is the sense of putting in your time making them worse? Pretty soon you’ll talk and think and gloom yourself into doing something that’ll smash the china. So I’m going to meddle. Of course I don’t know you, and I haven’t any personal interest in you. But I’m interested in you as a sociological specimen. As such I’m going to be polite to you, and as entertaining as possible while we’re at Mrs. Stickney’s table. I shall expect you to be humanly polite to me. Do you understand?” She looked at him queerly, almost apprehensively. When she replied her voice was low, not cold, not friendly. Jim’s will had encountered her will and been the stronger. “Yes,” she said. “You’ll be reasonably decent—so Mrs. Stickney won’t lose her appetite?” “Yes. In the house. But nowhere else. And I shall hate you—hate you.” “That’s enough for a beginning.” “And don’t you dare to watch me. Don’t dare to pry into my affairs. Don’t dare to interfere with me in any way.”