"You must not be offended with Rosamund's ways, you know! She is not like anybody else."
Flood turned his head and smiled into her eyes. He waited a full half-minute before he replied. "No," he said, slowly. "No, she is not like anyone else!" He took several deep breaths of his cigarette, then spoke with little pauses between each phrase, as if he were thinking out what he had to say. "She's—she's a dream-woman come true! She's the lady of one's imagination!"
"Dear me!" Mrs. Maxwell remarked, with sisterly lack of enthusiasm. Flood threw back his head with a little laugh.
"I wonder which surprises you most," he said, "to hear that said of your sister, or to find out that I have an imagination?"
Mrs. Maxwell had had time to become an adept at begging the question. "Well," she said, "one doesn't usually associate imagination and—dream-women, you know, with your type. I mean, with business men!"
"Oh, pray don't mind saying 'my type'! It's good for me to hear it, because it is just there that I lose. I am of a different type—or class—from you and your sister; even from our friend Pendleton. Miss Randall sees that, and she will not try to look beyond it. She will not let herself know me better, because she doesn't want to; and she doesn't want to because I am not—I suppose she'd call it her 'sort.'"
He spoke without a trace of bitterness, and smiled again at Mrs. Maxwell's well-executed manner of protest.
"Why, no one knows that better than I do," he went on. "She's five or six generations ahead of me in civilization, you know; her grandmother left off where my grand-daughter would have to begin. That's why I want her. I'm naturally impatient, and I want to see my wife doing and feeling and thinking a lot of things that are quite beyond my apprehension. She's just what I've always imagined a woman ought to be, and I want her."
"I don't think she'd credit you with any such imagination," Mrs. Maxwell said, adding, somewhat dryly, "with any imagination at all!"
"That is just my difficulty," Flood replied. "She will not give herself a chance to find me out." He smiled as he met her puzzled look. "You know—I am only stating the fact—I have—er—accumulated a great deal of money—a great deal, more than I know myself!"