For a man intent upon stern purpose, Reuben felt remarkably unhurried. “My business can wait,” he said, gesturing her again to her chair. “It has no such urgency that you need disturb yourself for me and turn a lady into a message-bearer.” He noted the quick flush of pleasure which rose to her cheeks on the word “lady.”
“Indeed,” he went on, “I find myself blame-worthy and unaccountably a laggard that this is the first time I have made your acquaintance.”
“Oh! I... I am not much in the world, sir.”
“The world is the loser, Miss Bradshaw. But it is not too late to find a remedy for that. They tell us the North is poor soil for flowers and with an answer like you to their lies it would be criminal to hide it.”
Crude flattery, but it hit the target. “I? A flower? Oh, sir—”
“Why call me sir? If you were what—well, to be frank, what I expected to find you, a spinner’s wench, no more than that, why then your sirring me would be justifiable. There are social laws. I don’t deny it.”
“We have no position,” she assented.
“What’s position when there’s beauty? You have that which cuts across the laws. Beauty, and not rustic beauty either, but beauty that’s been worked on and refined... I go too fast, I say too much. Excuse a man in the heat of making a discovery for being frank about what he’s found and forget my frankness and forgive it. I spoke only to convince you that a ‘sir’ from you to me is to reverse the verities.”
“But you are Mr. Hepplestall?”
“Then call me so. I mount no pedestal for you.” Then Peter came in, and Hepplestall retired his thoughts of Phoebe to some secondary brain-cell that lay becomingly remote from Dorothy Verners and from his immediate plan of picking up knowledge from Peter. The lawyer had been right: there was no question of Peter’s setting a price upon his trade secrets, he was ravished by the interest his ground-landlord was pleased to take in his little factory and if he was puzzled to find Hepplestall intelligent and searching in his questions, there was none more pleased than Peter to answer with painstaking elaboration. Once Reuben asked, “Are there not factories driven by steam?”