But tell me--we have both agreed to be frank--why have you changed your attitude towards me so completely?
I scarcely dared to hope even for your recognition this morning." She was suddenly thoughtful.
"That was the very question I was asking myself when we crossed the street just now," she remarked, with a faint smile.
Maraton was conscious of a curious and undefined sense of pleasure in her words.

In the act of crossing he had held her arm for a few moments, and though her assent to his physical guidance had been purely negative, there was yet something about it which had given him a vague pleasure.

Instinctively he knew that she was of the order of women to whom the merest touch from a man whom they disliked would have been torture.
"I think," she went on, "that it is because I am trying to adopt my uncle's point of view towards you." "And what is your uncle's point of view ?" "He believes you," she declared, "to be a very dangerous person, a rabid enthusiast with brains and also stability--the most difficult order of person in the world to deal with." "Anything else ?" "He believes you," she continued, "to be harmless enough at a wholesome period of our country's history.

Just now, he told me yesterday, that he considered it was within your power to bring something very much like ruin upon the country." Maraton was silent.

He felt singularly indisposed for argument.