UPON A CARPET
it, fled from it! Not wearied; no, startled; suddenly realizing how this veiled talk of hers had been on the edge of her darling secret. No amount of circumnavigation through disarming topics could lead her back to talk of her squirrels, her foxes, her wanderings at odd hours among the hills. All the way home she had not spoken a serious word. She had left him at the veranda steps, and gone into the house laughing.
He was far from supposing her to be an absolute obstacle, as, in the heat of vexation, he had represented her to Rader. But to come at her by indirection would occupy much time. As for coming at her plainly as to a man, stating his object and his convictions, trying to "persuade" her as Rader put it—Carron smiled. He was not going into an argument with a woman while there was any other means of pursuing his object. In his crowded life he had had little time for experience of women, but what had been his had been acute. Certain discoveries had stuck in his mind: one, what that thing called argument amounted to, when it was between a man and a woman; the pitting of logic against will, of expostulation against infinite iteration, of a dogged clinging to one's own level-headedness against every attraction and aggravation the unfair half of man can summon. He gave this girl the credit of being
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