“I should look like a housemaid among them. How would you feel with a wife of that sort, when the other sort was about?”
“I should feel like a king, that's what I should feel like,” he replied indignantly.
“I shouldn't feel like a queen. I should feel MISERABLE.”
She sat with her little feet dangling, and her hands folded in her lap. Her infantile blue eyes held him as the Ancient Mariner had been held. He could not get away from the clear directness of them. He did not want to exactly, but she frightened him more and more.
“I should be ashamed,” she proceeded. “I should feel as if I had taken an advantage. What you've got to do is to find out something no one else can find out for you, Mr. Temple Barholm.”
“How can I find it out without you? It was you who put me on to the wedding-cake; you can put me on to other things.”
“Because I've lived in the place,” she answered unswervingly. “I know how funny it is for any one to think of me being Mrs. Temple Barholm. You don't.”
“You bet I don't,” he answered; “but I'll tell you what I do know, and that's how funny it is that I should be Mr. Temple Barholm. I've got on to that all right, all right. Have you?”
She looked at him with a reflection that said much. She took him in with a judicial summing up of which it must be owned an added respect was part. She had always believed he had more sense than most young men, and now she knew it.
“When a person's clever enough to see things for himself, he's generally clever enough to manage them,” she replied.