“Are you really?” asked Deborah with surprise, turning towards him eyes full of intelligence and sincerity. “I should have thought a man of your experience would have understood it so easily.”
There was no quality of his to which the earl would not rather have heard her allude than to his experience, suggesting, as it did, the years which had brought it. However, he had a great deal too much tact and shrewdness to betray his feeling on the subject.
“I confess,” he said, “that long and varied as my experience has been, your charming sex still has surprises for me. Will you explain the reason of the altered light in which you regard me?”
“There has been no alteration. It is simply this: You asked me to accompany you to London this morning with the definite object of trying to do you a service. In those circumstances, unless I am much mistaken in you, a girl might safely trust herself in your care from here to Japan.”
The girl’s spirit and modesty took the old roué by storm. It was such a deft and graceful appeal to all that was best in the traditions of his not very worthy school, that this particular girl was indeed, after making it, an almost sacred object in his eyes. He leaned back in his seat in the carriage, regarding her with admiration more respectfully than before.
“What a strangely different world this would be,” he said at last, “if only half the women in it possessed your divine attribute of common sense!”
“Perhaps there are some divine attributes lacking in the men, too,” suggested Deborah demurely.
“That is more than likely. But who, that knows anything about him, would expect divinity in such a creature as a man?”
“Not I, for one,” answered Deborah, with simple sincerity which was rather startling.
“And it’s rather hard, isn’t it, that such commonplace, tainted wretches as we are, should expect such moral perfection in our helpmates.”