As a matter of fact I wasn't serious."
He was annoyed to feel that he was flushing. He could not fathom her,
but he had a conviction that she _had_ been serious and that this
attitude was a mere pose. "Nevertheless, I think it can be managed," he
insisted. "And I want you to help me."
She listened to his plan. "What you will call a Daddy-Long-Leggish
pretense," he explained to her with an attempt at facetiousness. "You to
do the hiring and ... and yours truly to provide the wherewithal. Until
things look up a bit. Of course then ... why, naturally, when things
look up a bit for her...."
But Lily remained lukewarm. She wasn't quite sure that it would be ...
oh, well, he knew what she meant! It seemed too absurd to think that he
had given an ear to anything so extravagant. She would like to be of
service to Miss Robson, of course, but, after all, she felt that it was
taking an unfair advantage of the girl.
"If she's everything you say she is, she'd resent it all tremendously,"
she put forth as a final objection.
"But she isn't to know! That's the point of the whole thing," he
explained, with absurd simplicity.
"Oh, my dear man, she isn't to know, but she _will_, ultimately. You
don't suppose the secret of a woman's meal-ticket is hidden very long,
do you? And, besides, you couldn't offer her enough to live on. That
would be absurd on the very face of it.
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