"It's partly just the look of you, but it's most of all just—just that I'm certain no one in the world is so kind and brave—"
"I brave! You poor child!"
"Yes, and kind, deep down to the core," she said, with beaming eyes. "I know it by your voice, and by the way you feel everybody else's feeling. That's something like me: I feel, too, but it doesn't make me kind."
"Neither does it me. I'm a mass of deception. I put on a solemn look, and you think I'm sympathizing. I'm not: I'm actively engaged in despising the universe."
"That's because your standards are so high."
He laughed out an ironic "Exactly!"
"You make other people seem about so high." She held an out-stretched hand a few inches above the grass, dropped it, and, leaning forward upon it, said, with a quick-drawn breath: "It's been so exciting for us all here, knowing you. It's been like knowing Robert Bruce or Richard Cœur de Lion—"
"Oh, very like Richard Cœur de Lion especially."
"Just what I say, particularly when you put on that black look and your eyes burn. I know then you'd have the courage for anything!"
The whimsical amusement died out of his face.