"It--it
gives me a strange feeling to have depended so entirely on you, and then
to find out that you were thinking of me all the while as Jerome does."
"Have I been?" inquired Stoddard. "As Jerome does? What a passion it
seems to be with folks to classify their friends. People call me a
Socialist, because I am trying to find out what I really do think on
certain economic and social subjects. I doubt that I shall ever bring up
underneath any precise label, and yet some people would think it
egotistical that I insisted upon being a class to myself. I very much
doubt that I hold Mr. Hardwick's opinion exactly in any particular." He
looked at the girl with a sort of urgency which she scarcely
comprehended. "Miss Sessions," he said, "I wear my hair longer than most
men, and the barber is always deeply grieved at my obstinacy. I never
eat potatoes, and many well-meaning persons are greatly concerned over
it--they regard the exclusion of potatoes from one's dietary as almost
criminal. But you--I expect in you more tolerance concerning my
peculiarities. Why must you care at all what I think, or what my views
are in this matter?"
"Oh, I don't understand you at all," Lydia said distressfully.
"No?" agreed Stoddard with an interrogative note in his voice. "But
after all there's no need for people to be so determined to understand
each other, is there?"
Lydia looked at him with swimming eyes.
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