"Had I
been in your place, I should probably have done the same and behaved
much more outrageously. For you were outrageous, you know."
"But had you been in my place, and I in yours," he answered, with a
weak attempt at humor, "there would have been no need."
She smiled, glad that he was feeling less strongly about it.
"But, unhappily, our social wisdom does not permit such a reversal," he
added, more with a desire to be saying something.
"Ah!" she laughed. "There's where my Jesuitism comes in. I can rise
above our social wisdom."
"You don't mean to say,--that--?"
"There, shocked as usual! No, I could not be so crude as to speak
outright, but I might _finesse_, as you whist-players say. Accomplish
the same end, only with greater delicacy. After all, a distinction
without a difference."
"Could you?" he asked.
"I know I could,--if the occasion demanded. I am not one to let what I
might deem life-happiness slip from me without a struggle. That"
(judicially) "occurs only in books and among sentimentalists. As my
father always says, I belong to the strugglers and fighters. That
which appeared to me great and sacred, that would I battle for, though
I brought heaven tumbling about my ears."
"You have made me very happy, Vance," she said at parting by the
Barracks gates. "And things shall go along in the same old way.
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