'I want to start fair,' said the millionaire, 'and I'd rather your impression should improve than get worse. The only real trouble with Lucifer was he started too high up.'
This singular statement was made with perfect gravity, and without the slightest humorous intention, but Margaret laughed for the first time that day, in spite of the storm that was still raging in the near distance of her thoughts.
'Why do you laugh?' asked Van Torp. 'It's quite true. I don't want to start too high up in your estimation and then be turned down as unfit for the position at the end of the first week. Put me where I belong and I won't disappoint you. Say I was doing something that wasn't exactly low-down, considering the object, [{230}] but that mightn't pass muster at an honour-parade, anyhow. And then say that I've admitted the fact, if you like, and that the better I know you the less I want to do anything mean. It won't be hard for you to look at it in that light, will it? And it'll give me the position of starting from the line. Is that right?'
'Yes,' Margaret answered, smiling. 'Slang "right" and English "right"! You ask for a fair field and no favour, and you shall have it.'
'I'll go straight,' Van Torp answered.
He was conscious that he was hourly improving his knowledge of women's little ways, and that what he had said, and had purposely expressed in his most colloquial manner, had touched a chord which would not have responded to a fine speech. For though he often spoke a sort of picturesque dialect, and though he was very far from being highly educated, he could speak English well enough when he chose. It probably seemed to him that good grammar and well-selected words belonged to formal occasions and not to everyday life, and that it was priggish to be particular in avoiding slang and cowardly to sacrifice an hereditary freedom from the bonds of the subjunctive mood.
'I suppose Lady Maud will come, won't she?' he asked suddenly, after a short silence.
'I hope so,' Margaret said. 'If not, she will meet me in Paris, for she offers to do that in her letter.'
'I'm staying on in this place because you said you didn't mind,' observed Van Torp. 'Do you want me to go away if she arrives?' [{231}]
'Why should I? Why shouldn't you stay?'