“Yes, everybody!”
“You don’t mean every last one of ’em, though, do you, Muriel?” he asked plaintively.
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, but look here,” he said. “You couldn’t mean that. It would include your own family, and all your old family neighbours. Why, it might include some of your very best friends!”
She sighed. “Since I’ve come home, I’ve felt that really I had nothing in common with a single soul in the place. I don’t live on the same plane. I don’t think the same thoughts. I don’t speak the same language.”
He appeared to swallow a little air and to find some difficulty in doing so. “I know,” he said, “you do talk a lot more intellectually than the rest of us dubs around here. It’s because you’ve got a more intellectual nature, and everything like that; and that’s one of the reasons I look up to you the way I do. I always used to think that a girl that usually had an intellectual nature had to wear horn spectacles and have her dress higher on one side than it was on the other, and wear these sensible-looking shoes, and everything like that. But you’ve showed me I was mistaken, Muriel. You made me see that a girl could have an intellectual nature and be prettier and dress niftilier than all the brainless ones put together. But what worries me is——” He paused uncomfortably, and repeated, “What worries me is——” then paused again, and, with his head on one side, moved his forefinger to and fro between his collar and his neck as if he felt a serious tightness there.
“Well?” Muriel said, after waiting for some time. “Do you wish me to understand it’s your neckwear that worries you, Renfrew?”
“No,” he said absently, and frowning in his pained earnestness, again repeated: “What worries me is——” Once more he stopped.
“Well, well!”
“It’s simply this,” he said. “What worries me is simply this. It’s like this. For instance, do you think it’s absolutely necessary for them both to have an intellectual nature?”