“I am sure you have,” the duke said.
“It's because of that I began to say this.” Tembarom spoke hurriedly that he might thrust away the sudden dark thought. “You're a man, and I'm a man; far away ahead of me as you are, you're a man, too. I was crazy to get her to marry me and come here with me, and she wouldn't.”
The duke's eyes lighted anew.
“She had her reasons,” he said.
“She laid 'em out as if she'd been my mother instead of a little red-headed angel that you wanted to snatch up and crush up to you so she couldn't breathe. She didn't waste a word. She just told me what I was up against. She'd lived in the village with her grandmother, and she knew. She said I'd got to come and find out for myself what no one else could teach me. She told me about the kind of girls I'd see—beauties that were different from anything I'd ever seen before. And it was up to me to see all of them—the best of them.”
“Ladies?” interjected the duke gently.
“Yes. With titles like those in novels, she said, and clothes like those in the Ladies' Pictorial. The kind of girls, she said, that would make her look like a housemaid. Housemaid be darned!” he exclaimed, suddenly growing hot. “I've seen the whole lot of them; I've done my darndest to get next, and there's not one—” he stopped short. “Why should any of them look at me, anyhow?” he added suddenly.
“That was not her point,” remarked the duke. “She wanted you to look at them, and you have looked.” T. Tembarom's eagerness was inspiring to behold.
“I have, haven't I?” he cried. “That was what I wanted to ask you. I've done as she said. I haven't shirked a thing. I've followed them around when I knew they hadn't any use on earth for me. Some of them have handed me the lemon pretty straight. Why shouldn't they? But I don't believe she knew how tough it might be for a fellow sometimes.”
“No, she did not,” the duke said. “Also she probably did not know that in ancient days of chivalry ladies sent forth their knights to bear buffeting for their sakes in proof of fealty. Rise up, Sir Knight!” This last phrase of course T. Tembarom did not know the poetic significance of.