“I am. Still, I don’t want you to think that it’s merely because Miss Kinnaird comes from the same country that I do that I didn’t expect her to realize that to stand posed for an hour or so is apt to cramp one.”
Ida laughed. It evidently was clear to him that Miss Kinnaird regarded him as a packer and nothing else, and had decided that he had probably grown used to physical discomfort. Ida was, however, rather pleased to see that he accepted the fact good-humoredly and did not resent it. She was in no way astonished that he should answer her as he had, for, in the west, a man may speak naturally to any young woman who addresses him, without feeling called on to remember the distinctions of caste.
“I wonder,” she said, “whether you would tell me what caused the trouble you were mixed up in two or three nights ago.”
Weston’s face grew slightly flushed, for he was still in certain respects somewhat ingenuous; but he told her simply what had led up to the affray.
“After all you could hardly blame the boys,” he added. “They had had a hard day, and it was not the first time Grenfell had done them out of their supper.”
“Still, he had spoiled your supper, too,” said Ida. “If you couldn’t blame them, why did you interfere?”
It was rather a difficult question. Weston could not very well tell her, even had he quite realized it, that there was in him a vein of rudimentary chivalry that had been carefully fostered by his mother. The males of the Weston line had clung to traditions, but they had for the most part been those of the Georgian days, when very little refinement of sentiment was expected from the country gentleman. The traditions Agnes Weston had held by, however, went back to an earlier age. She had been High Church and imaginative, a woman of impracticable as well as somewhat uncomfortable ideals, and finding her husband proof against them she had done what she could with her son. The result was a somewhat happy one, for in the Kid, as his comrades termed him, her fantasies and extravagances had been toned down by the very prosaic common sense of the Weston male line. They were full-fleshed, hard-riding Englishmen who lived on beef and beer. Though Weston was naturally not aware of it, there were respects in which Ida Stirling was like his mother. Ida, however, usually kept her deeper thoughts to herself, which Mrs. Weston had seldom done, but she shaped her life by them, and they were wholesome.
“Well,” he said diffidently, “it was quite a humiliating situation for the old man. He was a person of some consequence once—a rather famous assayer and mineralogist—and I think he felt it.”
“That is not what I asked you,” said Ida, with a trace of dryness.
Weston spread out his hands as though to excuse himself.