“Is that a great trouble?”
“It takes a lot of valuable time,” he answered with a smile.
They turned toward the house, and after getting the twine he joined her in a cool, shadowy room. Gertrude was watching a silver spirit-lamp; near which two dainty cups and plates were laid out.
“That’s a very pretty outfit,” he remarked. “Is it English?”
“No; I bought it at a big store in Winnipeg—on Portage Avenue, I think.”
“I know the place. So they’re selling this kind of thing there! It’s significant. A few years ago they’d have got nobody to buy such truck.” He picked up a cup and held it to the light after examining the chaste color, design, and stamp. “Anyway, it’s English; the genuine article. I believe the biscuit can’t be imitated.”
Gertrude had not expected him to understand artistic china.
“I’ve read about these things,” he explained with a good-humored laugh; “and I’ve a way of remembering. We have time in winter, and one is glad to study anything that comes along. Still, I’ll allow that I found five-cent cans quite good enough when I first came out.”
This was not a point of much importance, but it fixed Gertrude’s attention. She was in the habit of roughly sorting people into different groups; there were, for example, those who appreciated beautiful things and had been endowed with them as a reward of merit, and those of coarser nature on whom they would be wasted, which was, no doubt, why they had none. Yet here was a man with artistic taste, who was nevertheless engaged in hard manual labor and had drunk contentedly out of common cans. It did not fit in with her theories.
“I suppose this country has its influence on one?” she said, searching for an explanation.