The girl laughed at him and shrugged her round white shoulders.
"For a young diplomat, Cord, you are too obvious--too delightfully verdant. You should study indirection, subtlety, finesse--study Poltavo!"
"Study the devil!" he muttered under his breath.
"That too, for a diplomat, is necessary!" she murmured sweetly.
"He isn't coming here to-night?" Van Ingen asked in aggrieved tones.
The girl nodded, her eyes dancing with laughter.
"What you can see in that man, Doris," he protested, "passes me! I'll bet you anything you like that the fellow's a rogue! A smooth, soft-smiling rascal! Lady Dinsmore," he appealed to the older woman, "do you like him?"
"Oh, don't ask Aunt Patricia!" cried the girl. "She thinks him quite the most fascinating man in London. Don't deny it, auntie!"
"I shan't," said that lady calmly, "for it's true! Count Poltavo," she paused to inspect through her lorgnettes some newcomers in the opposite box, "Count Poltavo is the only interesting man in London. He is a genius." She shut her lorgnettes with a snap. "It delights me to talk with him. He smiles and murmurs gay witticisms and quotes Talleyrand and Lucullus, and all the while in the back of his head, quite out of reach, his real opinions of you are being tabulated and ranged neatly in a row, like bottles on a shelf."
"I'd like to take down some of those bottles," said Doris thoughtfully. "Maybe some day I shall."
"They're probably labelled poison," remarked Van Ingen, a little viciously. He looked at the girl with a growing sense of injury. Of late she had seemed absolutely changed toward him; and from being his dear friend, his childhood's mate, with established intimacies, she had turned before his very eyes into an alien, almost an enemy, more beautiful than ever, to be true, but perverse, mocking, impish. She flouted him for his youth, his bluntness, his guileless transparency. But hardest of all to bear was the delicate derision with which she treated his awkward attempts to express his passion for her, to speak of the fever which had taken possession of him, almost against his will, and which at sight of her throbbed madly at his wrists and temples. And now, he reflected bitterly, with this velvet fop of a count looming up as a possible rival, with his _savoir faire_, and his absurd penchant for literature and art, what chance had he, a plain American, against such odds?--unless, as he profoundly believed, the chap was a crook. He determined to sound her father.