"Why? Because I say the first thing that asks to be said?"
"That, and some other things," he rejoined guardedly. Then, with malice aforethought: "Is it one of the requirements that your centennial man should behave himself like a boor at a dinner-table, and talk shop and eat with his knife?"
"You know that isn't what I meant. Manners don't make the man. It's what you talked about—the trumpery little social things that you found your keenest pleasure in talking about. I don't know what has ever taken you out to a construction camp and persuaded you to wear khaki. Perhaps it was only what Colonel-daddy calls a 'throw-back.' I don't believe you ever did a day's hard work in your life before you came to the Timanyoni."
Smith looked at his hands. They were large and shapely, but the only callouses they could show were accusingly recent.
"If you mean manual labor, you are right," he admitted thoughtfully. "Just the same, I think you are a little hard on me."
It was growing dark by this time, and the stars were coming out. Some one had turned the lights on in the room the windows of which opened upon the portico, and the young woman's chair was so placed that he could still see her face. She was smiling rather more amicably when she said:
"You mustn't take it too hard. It isn't you, personally, you know; it's the type. I've met it before. I didn't meet any other kind during my three years in the boarding-school; nice, pleasant young gentlemen, as immaculately dressed as their pocketbooks would allow, up in all the latest little courtesies and tea-table shop-talk. They were all men, I suppose, but I'm afraid a good many of them had never found it out—will never find it out. I've been calling it environment; I don't like to admit that the race is going down-hill."
By this time the sardonic humor was once more in full possession and he was enjoying her keenly.
"Go on," he said. "This is my night off."
"I've said enough; too much, perhaps. But a little while ago at the dinner-table, and again out there in the grove where you were walking with mamma, you reminded me so forcibly of a man whom I met just for a part of one evening about a year ago."