In this growing intimacy Floyd became less sensitive to Marion's positive, dogmatic manner. Occasionally it would be so exhibited as to cause him an inward sigh and a feeling of wonder that a girl so attractive should not realize the value of deference and hesitation. But he grew more indulgent to her failings when he understood that they proceeded from an excess of frankness rather than from conceit, which he had at one time suspected to be her unlovely fault. She was not conceited; she was kind and sympathetic and thoughtful, as conceited persons never are. He decided that she merely had a sense of being adequate to any emergency which might confront her own life; she did not profess adequacy for the emergencies of other people's lives. That, after all, constituted the difference between a worthy self-confidence and a disagreeable conceit.
And yet, though he was growing more and more fond of her all the time, he could not quite abandon the wish that she were somewhat less adequate even to her own emergencies. She would be so much more appealing if she would only once in a while make an appeal!—show, even tentatively, some fluttering little signal of distress!
That which succeeded best in filling this deficiency and winning him to a gentler and more forbearing regard was her enthusiasm for him. She admired him and applauded his course. When he told her that through an agency he had engaged two hundred armed watchmen, who were to be sent up the river by boat to occupy the works and defend returning workmen from assault, she approved the independent act.
"We can get no protection from the New Rome police," he said to her. "They're few in number and they're in sympathy with the Affiliated. We can get no help from the sheriff of the county. He says—properly enough—that he can't go up there with a posse and wait for trouble. So this seems to be the only course left to us.
