“Yes--and no,” replied she, with constraint and some confusion. “A year or so ago I--people thought--you and she had--had drifted apart. Then it looked as though you had come together again. It seemed the natural thing. She is beautiful and has so much charm.” “She was unhappy in America. She wished to be free.” Mary looked at me reflectively. “You are not--inconsolable, I see,” said she with a smile of faint raillery. “My brother has often told me about you--how indifferent you are to women. Perhaps that is why you are attractive to them.” “Am I?” said I. “I did not know it.” “You are terribly impersonal,” she went on laughingly. “Last summer I--well, I was not--that is, not exactly--trying to flirt with you. But your absolute unconsciousness of me as a woman was often very--baffling.” I laughed. “You thought that?” “How could I help seeing it? Why, you treated me precisely as if I were another man. Not that I didn’t like it, on the whole. A woman gets tired of being always on guard.” She smiled at herself. “That sounds horribly conceited. But you know what I mean. The men never lose a chance to practice. Then, too--well, if a woman has the reputation of being rich she need not flatter herself that it is her charms that do all the drawing.” “That’s the supreme curse of money--it all but cuts one off from love and friendship. Fortunately it, to a great extent, takes the place of them.” “I don’t like to hear you say that,” said she. “How many poor people get love and friendship?” replied I. “Isn’t it the truth that there is little--very, very little--real love or friendship in the world? All I meant was that money, and the independence and comfort and the counterfeit of affection it brings, are better than nothing at all.” “Oh, I see,” said she. “You are so sensible--and you don’t cant. That was why I liked to talk with you. At first I thought you cynical and hard. That’s the first impression plain good sense makes. We are used to hearing only shallow sentimentality.” “The unending flapdoodle,” said I. “Flapdoodle,” agreed she. “Then--I began to discover that you were anything but hard--that you looked at people as they are, and liked them for themselves, not for what they pretended to be. I was beginning to trust you--to venture timidly in the direction of being my natural self--when you left.” “Well--here I am again,” said I. “And we start in afresh.” She smiled with embarrassment. “Yes,” she said hesitatingly. “But the circumstances have changed somewhat.”