"Oh, you're the plainest, are you? What on earth are they like?"
"They're quite good-looking, and they're awfully chic. But that's in parentheses. What I mean is that they're always hectoring me because I'm not attractive--"
"I'm not fishing for compliments. I'm too busy and too angry for that. I want to go on talking about what we're talking about."
"But I want to know why they said you were unattractive."
"Well, perhaps they didn't say it. What they have said is this, and it's what Mrs. Rossiter says--she said it to-day--that I'm only attractive to one man in five hundred--"
"No; she didn't say that. She merely admitted that her brother Hugh was that man--"
He interrupted with something I wished at the time he hadn't said, and which I tried to ignore:
"He's the man in that five hundred--and I know another in another five hundred, which makes two in a thousand. You'd soon get up to a high percentage, when you think of all the men there are in the world."
As he had never hinted at anything of the kind before, it gave me--how shall I put it?--I can only think of the word fright--it gave me a little fright. It made me uneasy. It was nothing, really. It was spoken with that gleaming smile of his which seemed to put distance between him and me--between him and everything else that was serious--and yet subconsciously I felt as one feels on hearing the first few notes, in an opera or a symphony, of that arresting phrase which is to work up into a great motive. I tried to get back to my original theme, rising to move on as I did so.
"Good gracious!" I cried. "Isn't the world big enough for us all? Why should we go about saying unkind and untrue things of one other, when each of us is an essential part of a composite whole? Isn't it the foot saying to the hand I have no need of thee, and the eye saying the same thing to the nose? We've got something you haven't got, and you've got something we haven't got. Why shouldn't we be appreciative toward each other, and make our exchange with mutual respect as we do with trade commodities?"
It was probably to urge me on to talk that he said, with a challenging smile: "What have you Canadians got that we haven't? Why, we could buy and sell you."