One Man in His Time | Page 4

her, but he couldn't help looking at her. If she had been
on the cover of a magazine, he had told himself sternly, he should never
have bought it. He had correct ideas of what a lady should be (they
were inherited from the early eighties and his mother had implanted
them), and he would have known anywhere that Patty Vetch was not
exactly a lady. Though he was broad enough in his views to realize that
types repeat themselves only in variations, and that girls of to-day are

not all that they were in the happy eighties--that one might make up
flashily like Geraldine St. John, or dance outrageously like Bertha
Underwood, and yet remain in all essential social values "a lady"--still
he was aware that the external decorations of a chorus girl could not
turn the shining daughter of the St. Johns for an imitation of paste, and,
though the nimble Bertha could perform every Jazz motion ever
invented, one would never dream of associating her with a circus ring.
It was not the things one did that made one appear unrefined, he had
concluded at last, but the way that one did them; and Patty Vetch's way
was not the prescribed way of his world. Small as she was there was
too much of her. She contrived always to be where one was looking.
She was too loud, too vivid, too highly charged with vitality; she was
too obviously different. If a redbird had flown into the heated glare of
the ballroom Stephen's gaze would have followed it with the same
startled and fascinated attention.
As the girl approached him now on the snow-covered slope, he was
conscious again of that swift recoil from chill disapproval to reluctant
attraction. Though she was not beautiful, though she was not even
pretty according to the standards with which he was familiar, she
possessed what he felt to be a dangerous allurement. He had never
imagined that anything so small could be so much alive. The electric
light under which she passed revealed the few golden freckles over her
childish nose, the gray-green colour of her eyes beneath the black
eyelashes, and the sensitive red mouth which looked as soft and sweet
as a carnation. It revealed also the absurd shoes of gray suede, with
French toes and high and narrow heels, in which she flitted, regardless
alike of danger and of common sense, over the slippery ground. The
son of a strong-minded though purely feminine mother, he had been
trained to esteem discretion in dress almost as highly as rectitude of
character in a woman; and by no charitable stretch of the imagination
could he endow his first impression of Patty Vetch with either of these
attributes.
"It would serve her right if she fell and broke her leg," he thought
severely; and the idea of such merited punishment was still in his mind
when he heard a sharp gasp of surprise, and saw the girl slip, with a

frantic clutch at the air, and fall at full length on the shining ground.
When he sprang forward and bent over her, she rose quickly to her
knees and held out what he thought at first was some queer small muff
of feathers.
"Please hold this pigeon," she said, "I saw it this afternoon, and I came
out to look for it. Somebody has broken its wings."
"If you came out to walk on ice," he replied with a smile, "why, in
Heaven's name, didn't you wear skates or rubbers?"
She gave a short little laugh which was entirely without merriment. "I
don't skate, and I never wear rubbers."
He glanced down at her feet in candid disapproval. "Then you mustn't
be surprised if you get a sprained ankle."
"I am not surprised," she retorted calmly. "Nothing surprises me. Only
my ankle isn't sprained. I am just getting my breath."
She had rested her knee on a bench, and she looked up at him now with
bright, enigmatical eyes. "You don't mind waiting a moment, do you?"
she asked. To his secret resentment she appeared to be deliberately
appraising either his abilities or his attractions--he wasn't sure which
engaged her bold and perfectly unembarrassed regard.
"No, I don't mind in the least," he replied, "but I'd like to get you home
if you have really hurt yourself. Of course it was your own fault that
you fell," he added truthfully but indiscreetly.
For an instant she seemed to be holding her breath, while he stood there
in what he felt to be a foolish attitude, with the pigeon (for all
symbolical purposes it might as well have been a dove) clasped to his
breast.
"Oh, I know," she responded presently in a voice which was full of
suppressed anger. "Everything is my