"People interest me more than things. One gets wrong ideas of Americans from those one often meets travelling. I shall like studying them on their own soil."
He lit a cigarette before he replied: "The best types you will probably not see. They do not push themselves prominently forward."
Miss Ballinger's eyes sparkled with amusement. "One would really think your object was to dissuade me from attempting to see your country."
"My object is to prevent your being disappointed. We are a very young, raw country. Youth, in the educational stage, is apt to offend against good taste. We are made up, at present, of odds and ends. You are sure to get hold of some odds. The ends require to be unravelled."
"I shall try and unravel them."
"Your brother is trying to do so now." He glanced down the row of deck-chairs to where Sir Mordaunt Ballinger sat on a stool beside the recumbent figure of a lady, so thickly veiled that it was impossible to see if she were young or old. "Have you made Mrs. Courtly's acquaintance? She is rather a complicated skein to unravel."
"We have exchanged a few words—just enough for me to know that she has a sweet voice and a very gracious manner."
"She is a charming woman, and a clever one. Not that she does anything or knows anything particularly well—at all events, much less than half our highly educated women. But she has that fine receptive capacity which makes her seize the scope and meaning of most things that do not demand preliminary study. Of course she is called 'superficial;' but what does that mean? That she has the artistic instinct unusually developed in a number of subjects, and an insatiable curiosity about everything."
"I had no idea she was that sort of person. I thought—I had been told that she was very fond of admiration—and—"
"I know all you heard. You need not tell me. She is often misunderstood; most of all, by her own sex. She is fond of dress, and dancing, and admiration. She is religious, and philosophical, and pictorial, and poetical—what is she not?—in turn. But she is never ill-natured, never slanderous. A female Proteus."