He told his sister, as nearly as he could, all that had passed between them.
“If he wanted me to talk to him,” he said, “why did he tell me that about Forgue? It was infernally stupid of him! But what’s bred in the bone—! A gentleman’s not made in a day!”
“Nor in a thousand years, Hector!” rejoined his sister. “Donal Grant is a gentleman in the best sense of the word! That you say he is not, lets me see you are vexed with yourself. He is a little awkward sometimes, I confess; but only when he is looking at a thing from some other point of view, and does not like to say you ought to have been looking at it from the same. And you can’t say he shuffles, for he never stops till he has done his best to make you!—What have you been saying to him, Hector?”
“Nothing but what I have told you; it’s rather what I have not been saying!” answered her brother. “He would have had me open out to him, and I wouldn’t. How could I! Whatever I said that pleased him, would have looked as if I wanted to secure my situation! Hang it all! I have a good mind to throw it up. How is a Graeme to serve under a bumpkin?”
“The man is not a bumpkin; he is a scholar and a poet!” said the lady.
“Pooh! pooh! What’s a poet?”
“One that may or may not be as good a man of business as yourself when it is required of him.”
“Come, come! don’t you turn against me, Kate! It’s hard enough to bear as it is!”
Miss Graeme made no reply. She was meditating all she knew of Donal, to guide her to the something to which she was sure her brother had not let him come; and presently she made him recount again all they had said to each other.
“I tell you, Hector,” she exclaimed, “you never made such a fool of yourself in your life! If I know human nature, that man is different from any other you have had to do with. It will take a woman, a better woman than your sister, I confess, to understand him; but I see a little farther into him than you do. He is a man who, never having had money enough to learn the bad uses of it, and never having formed habits it takes money to supply, having no ambition, living in books not in places, and for pleasure having more at his command in himself than the richest—he is a man who, I say, would find money an impediment to his happiness, for he must have a sense of duty with regard to it which would interfere with everything he liked best. Besides, though he does not care a straw for the judgment of the world where it differs from him, he would be sorry to seem to go against that judgment where he agrees with it: scorning to marry any woman for her money, he would not have the world think he had done so.”