you_ have behaved,"
suggested his companion.

"Oh, _I_ don't pretend to be a well-regulated character. Let me see--I
shall have to go back to the beginning to make you understand. I don't
know whether you know how Margaret was brought up? She had always lived
in the country; not a village--the old Cruger place was three miles from
everywhere; there she lived with her grandmother and her grandmother's
friends, not a young person among them; she hadn't even been to
school--always a governess at home. She was only seventeen when I first
saw her; we were there in the house together--Aunt Katrina's--and I was
at the time more in the dumps than I had ever been in my life. I had
just come back from abroad, as you know; and the reason I had come back,
which you don't know, was because some one (never mind who--not an
American) had gone off and married under my nose a man with a
million--several of them if you count in French. As I had expected to
marry her myself, you may imagine whether I enjoyed it. Feeling pretty
well cut up, smarting tremendously, if I must confess it, it seemed to
me, after a while, that it wouldn't be a bad idea to marry Margaret
Cruger. I couldn't feel worse than I did, and maybe I might feel better,
she was very sweet in her way; I don't pretend that I was ever in love
with her, but I liked her from the first. I have always had a fancy for
young girls," pursued Lanse, taking off his hat and putting it behind
his head as a pillow; "when they're not forward (American girls are apt
to be forward, though without in the least knowing it), they're
enchanting. The trouble is that they can't stay young forever; they
don't know anything, and of course they have to learn, and _that_
process is tiresome; it would be paradise if a girl of seventeen could
sit down like a woman of thirty, and paradise isn't intended, I suppose,
to come just yet."

"Don't talk your French to me," said Winthrop; "I don't admire it."

"That's another of your shams. Yes, you do. But it's perfectly true
that a young girl can no more sit down with grace than she can listen
with grace."

"Yes; you want to talk."

"On the contrary, I don't want to, I want to be silent; but I want them
to know how to listen to my silence. Well, I won't go into the details.
She was so young--Margaret--that I easily made her believe that I
couldn't live without her, that I should go to the bad direct unless she
would take charge of me--a thing that is apt