"I can't help a lot of the silly conventional things people say," he declared blandly. "Er—I suppose those things are true enough about people who are all alike, like a flock of sheep." Here he nodded towards the lamb which had just sprung out of Ivor's hands, and had made off to join his shorn brethren. "But I say—er—what I feel myself."
I looked at him doubtfully, the graceful creature whom I personally could not admire.
He said, "It wouldn't amuse me to try to make—er—love to anybody unless I felt that it would amuse them too, and—er—delight them!"
I objected, "But that's a woman's point of view."
"Why only a woman's?" asked the young soldier mildly, turning his wheel. "I learnt it from my mother. The woman's view! I find it useful to look at—er—Love and the like. 'Two things greater than all things are, the first is Love and the next is War.' The average man has made good on War, these last four years. But—er—I don't listen to him much on Love."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't think the average man makes a success of it," declared this puzzling creature coolly. "Give a kid of two a violin to play; what? I think he (the average man) could learn plenty from the average woman—on that one subject. It's with her my sympathies are, Miss Matthews.... Of course I talk too much.... And now you'll call me effeminate."
His face wore a mask of harmless politeness with a gleam behind his lashes as I looked at him. Effeminate? With that striped ribbon on his breast, with his colonelcy at twenty-six, with all the praise and devotion of his men? These things are not won by effeminates.
He was a man all right, even if he did say and think things which we imagine are exclusively feminine. He was a puzzling exception. And even if he were the kind of man whom I could never have loved I was beginning to like him.
Without replying to his remark about effeminacy, I smiled and got up.