A Woman's Will. Warner Anne

I shall always refuse.”

      Her eyes began to dance.

      “If I asked you to buy me an automobile!” she ventured.

      He glanced at her quickly.

      “Do you ask me for an automobile?” he demanded.

      Her eyes wandered towards a certain shop on the other side of the carriage way.

      “If I asked you for that necklace in the window there!”

      He raised his shoulders slightly.

      “Ladies prefer to buy their own necklaces,” he said briefly.

      She gave him a furtive look out of the corner of her eye.

      “Monsieur, suppose I beg you to take me back to the hotel and henceforth never speak to me!”

      He did not appear in the slightest degree alarmed. Instead he put his hand beneath her arm and turned her for another round of promenade.

      “I think the automobile will be best,” he said tranquilly. “I will find you a good chauffeur, and you can go to Zurich on its wheels.”

      “I only said ‘if,’ you know,” she murmured.

      “Yes, I know,” he replied; “but an automobile is always useful.” He thought a moment and then added, “About how much will you choose to pay for it?”

      In spite of herself she started and stared at him. He met her eyes with a smile of mockery; Its innuendo was unbearable.

      “You know very well,” she burst forth impetuously, “that I would never have thought of really accepting an automobile from you!”

      Then he laughed again with fresh amusement.

      “Comme madame se fâche!” he cried, “it is most droll! All that I may say you will believe.”

      “I find you very exasperating,” Rosina exclaimed, her cheeks becoming hotly pink; “you amuse yourself in a way that transcends politeness. I honestly think that you are very rude indeed, and I am in earnest now.”

      He made a careless movement with his head.

      “Would you have preferred that I should believe you really expect of me an automobile?” he asked.

      “You could not possibly have thought that anyhow, and so why should you have spoken as if you were afraid lest I might have meant it?”

      He rapped on a tree with his cane as he passed it.

      “‘Might,’ and ‘would,’ and ‘should,’” he said placidly, “those are the hardest words for a stranger to learn correctly.”

      She felt her temper slipping its anchor.

      “Probably when your tutor endeavored to teach you their difference you feared that yielding to his way might be sacrificing your independence, and so you refused to consider his instruction.”

      He struck another tree with his cane.

      “When you talk so fast and use such great words I cannot understand at all,” he said calmly.

      Then she fairly choked.

      “Are you quite really angry?” he asked with curiosity. She turned her face away and kept it averted.

      “Let us go into the café of the Nationale and dine,” he proposed suddenly.

      “No,” she said quickly, – “no, I must go home at once. I have a dinner engagement, and I must change my dress before I go.”

      “Then I shall not see you this evening?”

      “No” (very bitterly); “what a pity that will be!”

      “But to-morrow?”

      “I am going with a party to the Gutsch.”

      “But that will not be all day?”

      “Perhaps.”

      He hesitated in his step, and then came to a full stop.

      “Let us go up this little street,” he suggested. “I was there yesterday; it is interesting really.”

      She continued to walk on alone and he was obliged to rejoin her; then he glanced downward somewhat anxiously.

      “We cannot speak here,” he said in a low tone, “we know so many people that come against us each minute. Do walk with me up to the church there, we cannot go to the hotel like this.”

      It is true that the Quai at Lucerne has a trick of slipping away beneath one’s feet to the end that the hotel is forever springing up in one’s face. At this moment it loomed disagreeably close at hand.

      “If you want to walk farther, monsieur, you will have to walk alone; I am going home.”

      For answer he took her arm firmly in his and turned her across towards the church street. Well-bred people do not have scenes on the Schweizerhof Quai, so Rosina went where she was steered by the iron grip on her elbow.

      The instant that they were out of the crowd his manner and voice altered materially.

      “You must forgive me,” he pleaded. “I thought that you understood; I thought that we were together amused; it was against my intention to offend you.”

      She stopped and looked at a window full of carved bears and lions; various expressions contended in her face, but none of them were soft or sweet.

      “You pardon me, do you not?” he went on, laying his fingers upon her arm, while beneath his heavy eyelids there crept a look which his family would have regarded as too good to be true.

      She shook the hand off quickly with an apprehensive glance at their surroundings.

      “I ask you ten thousand pardons,” he repeated; “what can I do to make you know my feeling is true?”

      She bit her lip, and then a sudden thought occurred to her. Her anger took wings at once.

      “Will you walk back to the hotel on the outside,” she asked seriously, looking up into his face.

      He gave a quick movement of surprise, and then made his customary pause for decision.

      “How drolly odd women are,” he murmured presently, “and you are so very oddly droll!”

      “But will you do it?” she repeated insistently.

      He took his cane and drew a line in the dust between two of the cement blocks of the sidewalk, and then he lifted his eyes to hers with a smile so sweet and bright, so liquidly warm and winning, that it metamorphosed him for the nonce into a rarely handsome man.

      Few women are proof against such smiles, or the men who can produce them at will, and the remnants of Rosina’s wrath faded completely as she saw its dawning. It seemed futile to try to be cross with any one who had such magic in his face, and so she returned the glance in kind.

      “And you will walk home on the outside, will you not?” she asked, quite secure as to his answer now.

      He laughed lightly and turned to continue on their way.

      “Of a surety not,” he said; “but we will be from now on very sympathique, and never so foolishly dispute once more.”

      At the dinner-party that evening was the young American who was engaged to the girl at Smith College.

      “I saw you walking with Von Ibn this afternoon,” he said to Rosina as they chanced together during the coffee-and-cigarette period.

      “Where?” she asked. “I don’t remember seeing you anywhere.”

      “No; he appeared to engross you pretty thoroughly. I feel that I ought to warn you.”

      “What about?”

      “He isn’t a bit popular.”

      “Poor man!”

      “None of the men ever have anything to do with him; you never see him with any one, and it’s odd, because he talks English awfully well.”

      “What