She met him afterward, once,
as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get into her coupe,
and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very little, and so he
passed out of her life without having left any trace in her heart, though
Mela had a heart that she would have put at the disposition of almost any
young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself, Manhattan cockney as he was,
with scarcely more out look into the average American nature than if he
had been kept a prisoner in New York society all his days, perceived a
property in her which forbade him as a man of conscience to trifle with
her; something earthly good and kind, if it was simple and vulgar. In
revising his impressions of her, it seemed to him that she would come
even to better literary effect if this were recognized in her; and it
made her sacred, in spite of her willingness to fool and to be fooled, in
her merely human quality. After all, he saw that she wished honestly to
love and to be loved, and the lures she threw out to that end seemed to
him pathetic rather than ridiculous; he could not join Beaton in laughing
at her; and he did not like Beaton's laughing at the other girl, either.
It seemed to Kendricks, with the code of honor which he mostly kept to
himself because he was a little ashamed to find there were so few others
like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for the other girl--and Christine
appeared simply detestable to Kendricks--he had better keep away from
her, and not give her the impression he was in love with her.
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