"That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face like an edge of light.
"The sunrise," I answered.
"Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," she replied.
"You are always. The sunrise never leaves you."
Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered from childhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking and irresistible trick of expression.
"Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson's Dictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from the General besides those in speculations?"
I had got out of my starched shirt and my evening clothes, and the timidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky. "Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was the General. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of Sir Charles Grandison."
"Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it from the General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know."
"Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time."
"He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes, I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged to be married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before the wedding she found out some dreadful things about his life—and she behaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman of honour.' He—he ought to have married another woman, but even after Aunt Matoaca gave him up, he refused to do it—and this was what she never got over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no man would have spoken to him, she said—and can you believe it?—she declined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately in love with him all the time. She only began again when he got old and gouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't help disliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that he has never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It's because she's so perfectly honourable, I think—but, of course, it is her terrible experience that has made her so—so extreme in her views."