The Big-Town Round-Up Part 24

"Of course not. That's different," protested Beatrice indignantly.

"I don't see it. What she did was more embarra.s.sing for her than what I did for Kitty. At least it would have been mightily so if she hadn't used her good hawss sense and forgot that she was a lone young female and I was a man. That's what I did the other night. Just because there are seven or eight million human beings here the obligation to look out for Kitty was no less."

"New York isn't Arizona."

"You bet it ain't. We don't sit roostin' on a fence when folks need our help out there. We go to it."

"You can't do that sort of thing here. People talk."

"Sure, and hens cackle. Let 'em!"

"There are some things men don't understand," she told him with an acid little smile of superiority. "When a girl cries a little they think she's heartbroken. Very likely she's laughing at them up her sleeve.

This girl's making a fool of you, if you want the straight truth."

"I don't think so."

His voice was so quietly confident it nettled her.

"I suppose, then, you think I'm ungenerous," she charged.

The deep-set gray-blue eyes looked at her steadily. There was a wise little smile in them.

"Is that what you think?" she charged.

"I think you'll be sorry when you think it over."

She was annoyed at her inability to shake him, at the steadfastness with which he held to his point of view.

"You're trying to put me in the wrong," she flamed. "Well, I won't have it. That's all. You may take your choice, Mr. Lindsay. Either send that girl away--give her up--have nothing to do with her, or--"

"Or--?"

"Or please don't come here to see me any more."

He waited, his eyes steadily on her. "Do you sure enough mean that, Miss Beatrice?"

Her heart sank. She knew she had gone too far, but she was too imperious to draw back now.

"Yes, that's just what I mean."

"I'm sorry. You're leavin' me no option. I'm not a yellow dog.

Sometimes I'm 'most a man. I'm goin' to do what I think is right."

"Of course," she responded lightly. "If our ideas of what that is differ--"

"They do."

"It's because we've been brought up differently, I suppose." She achieved a stifled little yawn behind her hand.

"You've said it." He gave it to her straight from the shoulder. "All yore life you've been pampered. When you wanted a thing all you had to do was to reach out a hand for it. Folks were born to wait on you, by yore way of it. You're a spoiled kid. You keep these manicured lah-de-dah New York lads steppin'. Good enough. Be as high-heeled as you're a mind to. I'll step some too for you--when you smile at me right. But it's time to serve notice that in my country folks grow man-size. You ask me to climb up the side of a house to pick you a bit of ivy from under the eaves, and I reckon I'll take a whirl at it. But you ask me to turn my back on a friend, and I've got to say, 'Nothin'

doin'.' And if you was just a few years younger I'd advise yore pa to put you in yore room and feed you bread and water for askin' it."

The angry color poured into her cheeks. She clenched her hands till the nails bit her palms. "I think you're the most hateful man I ever met," she cried pa.s.sionately.

His easy smile taunted her. "Oh, no, you don't. You just think you think it. Now, I'm goin' to light a shuck. I'll be sayin' good-bye, Miss Beatrice, until you send for me."

"And that will be never," she flung at him.

He rose, bowed, and walked out of the room.

The street door closed behind him. Beatrice bit her lip to keep from breaking down before she reached her room.

CHAPTER XIX

A LADY WEARS A RING

Clarendon Bromfield got the shock of his life that evening. Beatrice proposed to him. It was at the Roberson dinner-dance, in the Palm Room, within sight but not within hearing of a dozen other guests.

She camouflaged what she was doing with occasional smiles and ripples of laughter intended to deceive the others present, but her heart was pounding sixty miles an hour.

Bromfield was not easily disconcerted. He prided himself on his aplomb. It was hard to get behind his cynical, decorous smile, the mask of a suave and worldly-wise Pharisee of the twentieth century.

But for once he was amazed. The orchestra was playing a lively fox trot and he thought that perhaps he had not caught her meaning.

"I beg your pardon."

Miss Whitford laced her fingers round her knee and repeated. It was as though rose leaves had brushed the ivory of her cheeks and left a lovely stain there. Her eyes were hard and brilliant as diamonds.

"I was wondering when you are going to ask me again to marry you."

Since she had given a good deal of feminine diplomacy to the task of keeping him at a reasonable distance, Bromfield was naturally surprised.

"That's certainly a leading question," he parried, "What are you up to, Bee? Are you spoofing me?"

"I'm proposing to you," she explained, with a flirt of her hand and an engaging smile toward a man and a girl who had just come into the Palm Room. "I don't suppose I do it very well because I haven't had your experience. But I'm doing the best I can."

The New Yorker was a supple diplomatist. If Beatrice had chosen this place and hour to become engaged to him, he had no objection in the world. The endearments that usually marked such an event could wait.

But he was not quite sure of his ground.

His lids narrowed a trifle. "Do you mean that you've changed your mind?"

"Have you?" she asked quickly with a sidelong slant of eyes at him.

"Do I act as though I had?"

"You don't help a fellow out much, Clary," she complained with a laugh not born of mirth. "I'll never propose to you again."