, Miss Vivian is as firm as the
firmest of your geological formations."

Gordon shook his head with a strange positive persistence.

"You are talking nonsense. You are not serious. You are not telling me
the truth. I don't believe that you attempted to make love to her.
You would n't have played such a game as that. It would n't have been
honorable."

Bernard flushed a little; he was irritated.

"Oh come, don't make too much of a point of that! Did n't you tell me
before that it was a great opportunity?"

"An opportunity to be wise--not to be foolish!"

"Ah, there is only one sort of opportunity," cried Bernard. "You
exaggerate the reach of human wisdom."

"Suppose she had let you make love to her," said Gordon. "That would
have been a beautiful result of your experiment."

"I should have seemed to you a rascal, perhaps, but I should have saved
you from a latent coquette. You would owe some thanks for that."

"And now you have n't saved me," said Gordon, with a simple air of
noting a fact.

"You assume--in spite of what I say--that she is a coquette!"

"I assume something because you evidently conceal something. I want the
whole truth."

Bernard turned back to the window with increasing irritation.

"If he wants the whole truth he shall have it," he said to himself.

He stood a moment in thought and then he looked at his companion again.

"I think she would marry you--but I don't think she cares for you."

Gordon turned a little pale, but he clapped his hands together.

"Very good," he exclaimed. "That 's exactly how I want you to speak."

"Her mother has taken a great fancy to your fortune and it has rubbed
off on the girl, who has made up her mind that it would be a pleasant
thing to have thirty thousand a year, and that her not caring for you is
an unimportant detail."

"I see--I see," said Gordon, looking at his friend with an air of
admiration for his frank and lucid way of putting things.

Now that he had begun to be frank and lucid, Bernard found a charm in
it, and the impulse under which he had spoken urged him almost violently
forward.

"The mother and daughter have agreed together to bag you, and Angela, I
am sure, has made a vow to be as nice to you after marriage as possible.
Mrs. Vivian has insisted upon the importance of that; Mrs. Vivian is a
great moralist."

Gordon kept gazing at his friend; he seemed positively fascinated.

"Yes, I have noticed that in Mrs. Vivian," he said.