Had he possessed the soul of a real man, he would have shriveled; but, being oblivious to all things save the pride of wealth and monstrous self-conceit, he merely snickered and reached for his cocktail--which, by the way, he was absorbing through a straw.
"I say, Miss Flint ?" he presently began again, stirring the ice in the cocktail.
"Well ?" she answered, curtly.
"If you--er--are really very, _very_ impatient to have a go at the links, why wait for Wally?
I--I should be only too glad to volunteer my services as your knight-errant, and all that sort of thing." "Thanks, awfully," she answered, "but Mr.Waldron promised to go round the course with me, this afternoon, and I'll wait." The impeccable one grinned fatuously, invited her again to have a drink--which she declined--and ordered another for himself, with profuse apologies for drinking alone; apologies which she hardly seemed to notice.
"Deuced bad form of Wally, I must say," the gilded youth resumed, trying to make capital for himself, "to leave you in the lurch, this way!" Silence from Catherine.

The would-be interloper, feeling that he was on the wrong track, took counsel with himself and remained for a moment immersed in what he imagined to be thought.

At last, however, with an oblique glance at his indifferent companion, he remarked.
"Devilish hard time women have in this world, you know! Don't you sometimes wish you were a man ?" Her answer flashed back like a rapier: "No! Do you wish _you_ were ?" Stunned by this "facer," Reginald Van Slyke gasped and stared.

That he, a scion of the Philadelphia Van Slykes, in his own right worth two hundred million dollars--dollars ground out of the Kensington carpet-mill slaves by his grandfather--should be thus flouted and put upon by the daughter of Flint, that parvenu, absolutely floored him.

For a moment he sat there speechless, unable even to reach for his drink; but presently some coherence returned.