.. I _know_!" She brought her
extravagant, her preposterous, her ignorant, her incredibly convincing
claims to an abrupt end.
"And you 'feel' that I ..." began Arnold, and could not go on.
"I'd like you for my brother," she said gently.
He tried to laugh at her, but the honest tears were in his eyes.
"You don't know what you're talking about, you silly dear," he said
unsteadily, "but I'm awfully glad you came to Lydford."
With her instinct for avoiding breaks, rough places, Sylvia quickly
glided into a transition from this speech back into less personal
talk. "Another queer thing about that experience I've never
understood:--it cured me of being so crazy about clothes. You wouldn't
think it would have anything to do with _that_, would you? And I don't
see how it did. Oh, I don't mean I don't dearly love pretty dresses
now. I _do_. And I spend altogether too much time thinking about
them--but it's not the same. Somehow the poison is out. I used to be
like a drunkard who can't get a drink, when I saw girls have things
I didn't. I suppose," she speculated philosophically, "I suppose any
great jolt that shakes you up a lot, shakes things into different
proportions."
"Say, that fellow must have been just about the limit!" Arnold's
rather torpid imagination suddenly opened to the story he had heard.
"No, no!" said Sylvia. "As I look back on it, I make a lot more sense
out of it" (she might have been, by her accent, fifty instead of
twenty-three), "and I can see that he wasn't nearly as bad as I
thought him.
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