“Oh, I do—now,” he replied with unwonted enthusiasm. “I must say that the blind rush everybody seems to be in is a trifle disconcerting at first—it makes an Englishman feel, rather, as if his youngest child—the child of his old age, as it were, was on a dead run, and that he must rush after to see what it was all about or be left behind like an old fogey. Upon my word I feel fully ten years older than I did when I landed.”
She laughed so heartily that he felt a sudden desire to say something really clever, and wondered why he usually took so little trouble.
“That is the very best statement of one of our racial differences I have heard,” she said; “I shall remember to tell it to my husband. He will be delighted. I feel the rush myself at times, for I was born in a far more languid climate. But New York is an electrifying place; it would fascinate you in time.”
“It fascinates me already!” he said gallantly, “and it is certainly reposeful here.”
“It is always the same, particularly at five o’clock,” she replied.
“Does that mean that I can drop in sometimes at this hour?”
“Will you?”
“I am afraid I shall be tempted to come every day.”
“That would be our pleasure,” and again she smiled. It was a smile that had warmed older hearts than the weary young profligate’s. “Augusta is almost invariably here and I usually am. Occasionally I drive down to bring my husband home.”
The Duke understood her perfectly. Her graceful pleasure in meeting him was not to be misconstrued. As she turned to greet a new comer he regarded her closely. If she had not taken the trouble to convey her subtle warning, he should have guessed that she loved her husband. Then he fell to wondering what sort of a man Forbes was to have developed the abundant harvest of such a woman’s nature. “She could easily have been made something very different in the wrong hands,” he thought, “and not in one respect only but in many. What a mess I should have made of a nature like that! Little Miss Creighton, with her meagre and neutral make-up is about all I am equal to. This woman might have lifted me up once; but more likely I should have dragged her down. She is all woman, the kind that is controlled and moulded by the will of a man.”