Part 43

He had got, clearly, a trifle more accustomed to her being extraordinary. “Are you sure we always know them apart?”

She weighed the responsibility. “I always do. Don’t you?”

“Not quite every time!”

“Oh,” she replied, “I don’t think, thank goodness, we have positively ‘every time’ to distinguish.”

“Yet we must always act,” he objected.

She turned this over; then with her wonderful living look, “I’m glad to hear it,” she exclaimed, “because, I fear, I always do! You’ll certainly think,” she added with more gravity, “that I’ve taken a line today!”

“Do you mean that of mistress of the house? Yes--you do seem in possession!”

“You don’t!” she honestly answered; after which, as to attenuate a little the rigour of the charge: “You don’t comfortably look it, I mean. You don’t look”--she was very serious--“as I want you to.”

It was when she was most serious that she was funniest. “How do you ‘want’ me to look?”

She endeavoured, while he watched her, to make up her mind, but seemed only, after an instant, to recognise a difficulty. “When you look at me, you’re all right!” she sighed. It was an obstacle to her lesson, and she cast her eyes about. “Look at that chimneypiece.”

“Well----?” he inquired as his eyes came back from it.

“You mean to say it isn’t lovely?”

He returned to it without passion--gave a vivid sign of mere disability. “I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t mean to say anything. I’m a rank outsider.”

It had an instant effect on her--she almost pounced upon him. “Then you must let me put you up!”

“Up to what?”

“Up to everything!”--his levity added to her earnestness. “You were smoking when you came in,” she said as she glanced about. “Where’s your cigarette?”

The young man appreciatively produced another. “I thought perhaps I mightn’t--here.”

“You may everywhere.”

He bent his head to the information. “Everywhere.”

She laughed at his docility, yet could only wish to presume upon it. “It’s a rule of the house!”

He took in the place with greater pleasure. “What delightful rules!”

“How could such a house have any others?”--she was already launched again in her brave relation to it. “I may go up just once more--mayn’t I--to the long gallery?”

How could he tell? “The long gallery?”

With an added glow she remembered. “I forgot you’ve never seen it. Why, it’s the leading thing about you!” She was full, on the spot, of the pride of showing it. “Come right up!”

Clement Yule, half seated on a table from which his long left leg nervously swung, only looked at her and smiled and smoked. “There’s a party up.”

She remembered afresh. “So we must be the party down? Well, you must give me a chance. That long gallery’s the principal thing I came over for.”

She was strangest of all when she explained. “Where in heaven’s name did you come over from?”

“Missoura Top, where I’m building--just in this style. I came for plans and ideas,” Mrs. Gracedew serenely pursued. “I felt I must look right at you.”