“Why, you talked quite a lot that day when you gave us so nice a lunch.”
“Oh, I always talk a lot—no mistake about that; but there’s no brains behind it all—no, not even grammar,” he added, after an anxious moment.
“You have plenty of brains,” she said, looking at him as if her remark had reference to the size of his head and she was verifying it. “What makes you fancy that you’ve no brains?”
“I do the wrong things so often—things that no chap would do if he had brains enough to think whether he should do them or not.”
“For instance?”
“Oh, for instance? Gloriana! I’ve instances enough. Well, go no further than this moment. I’m not sure that another chap—a chap that remembers things, and knows the decent thing to do—would have stopped you in the way I did.”
“Why shouldn’t you stop me if you wished? Why, you were excessively polite in asking me if you might walk with me to keep you from getting in the way of the chauffeur.”
“Of course—that’s all right the way you put it; but—but—well, I heard from Mrs. Pearce who you were, and then I read all that in the papers, so that I wasn’t sure if—if—it was just the thing, you know.”
“If it was quite in good taste to speak naturally to one who had suffered a recent bereavement?”
He nodded, his eyes brightening as if in recognition of the excellent way in which she expressed what was in his mind. He went further, seeming to feel quite pleased that he had in his mind something that could be so well expressed.