For a moment Gerty stared at him in blank amazement, in the midst of which she promptly told herself that henceforth she would be prepared for any eccentricities of which the male mind might be capable.  A hot flush mantled her cheek, and she spoke in a voice which had a new and womanly ring of decision.

“You would not like her,” she said, “and she would hate you.”

With an amused exclamation he replaced his coffee cup upon the table.  “Then she’d be a very foolish woman,” he observed.

“She believes in all the things that you scoff at—­she believes in the soul, in people, and in love—­”

He made a protest of mock dismay.  “My dear girl, I’ve been too hard hit by love not to believe in it.  On the contrary, I believe in it so firmly that I think the only sure cure for it is marriage.”

At her swift movement of aversion his laughing glance made a jest of the words, and she smiled back at him with the fantastic humour which had become almost her natural manner.  It was a habit of his to treat sportively even the subjects which he reverenced, and in reality she had sometimes felt him to be less of a sober cynic than herself.  He took his pleasures where he found them, and there was a touch of pathos in the generous eagerness with which he was ready to provide as well for the pleasures of others.  If he lacked imagination she had learned by now that he did not fail in its sister virtue, sympathy, and his keen gray eyes, which expressed so perfectly a gay derision, were not slow, she knew, to warm into a smiling tenderness.

“Laura is the most earnest creature alive,” she said after a moment.

“Is that so?  Then I presume she lacks a sense of humour.”

“She has a sense of honour at any rate.”

With a laugh he settled his figure more comfortably in his chair, and while she watched the movement, a little fascinated by its easy freedom, she felt a sudden impulse to reach out and touch his broad, strong shoulders as she might have touched the shoulders of a statue.  Were they really as hard as bronze, she wondered, or was that suggestion of latent power, of slumbering energy, as deceptive as the caressing glance he bent upon her?  The glance meant nothing she was aware—­he would have regarded her in much the same way had Perry been at her side, would have shone quite as affectionately, perhaps, upon her mother.  Yet, in spite of her worldly knowledge, she felt herself yielding to it as to a delicate flattery.  Her eyes were still on him, and presently he caught her gaze and held it by a look which, for all its fervour, had an edge of biting irony.  There was a meaning, a mystery in his regard, but his words when at last they came sounded almost empty.

“Oh, that’s well enough in its way,” he said, “but as a safeguard there’s no virtue alive that can stand against a sense of humour.  An instinct for the ridiculous will keep any man from going to the devil.”