“Well, Lady Canterville has been very kind to me; I hope she’ll continue.”
Lord Canterville passed a large fair hand, as for inspiration, over his beard. “My dear fellow, we’re excellent friends. No one could appreciate you more than Lady Canterville. Of course we can only consider such a question on the—a—the highest grounds. You’d never want to marry without knowing—as it were—exactly what you’re doing. I, on my side, naturally, you know, am bound to do the best I can for my own poor child. At the same time, of course, we don’t want to spend our time in—a—walking round the horse. We want to get at the truth about him.” It was settled between them after a little that the truth about Lemon’s business was that he knew to a certainty the state of his affections and was in a position to pretend to the hand of a young lady who, Lord Canterville might say without undue swagger, had a right to expect to do as well as any girl about the place.
“I should think she had,” Doctor Lemon said. “She’s a very rare type.”
His entertainer had a pleasant blank look. “She’s a clever well-grown girl and she takes her fences like a grasshopper. Does she know all this, by the way?”
“Oh yes, I told her last night.”
Again Lord Canterville had the air, unusual with him, of sounding, at some expense of precious moments, the expression of face of a visitor so unacquainted with shyness. “I’m not sure you ought to have done that, you know.”
“I couldn’t have spoken to you first—I couldn’t,” said Jackson Lemon. “I meant to; but it stuck in my crop.”
“They don’t in your country, I guess,” his lordship amicably laughed.
“Well, not as a general thing. However, I find it very pleasant to have the whole thing out with you now.” And in truth it was very pleasant. Nothing could be easier, friendlier, more informal, than Lord Canterville’s manner, which implied all sorts of equality, especially that of age and fortune, and made our young man feel at the end of three minutes almost as if he too were a beautifully-preserved and somewhat straitened nobleman of sixty, with the views of a man of the world about his own marriage. Jackson perceived that Lord Canterville waived the point of his having spoken first to the girl herself, and saw in this indulgence a just concession to the ardour of young affection. For his lordship seemed perfectly to appreciate the sentimental side—at least so far as it was embodied in his visitor—when he said without deprecation: “Did she give you any encouragement?”
“Well, she didn’t box my ears. She told me she’d think of it, but that I must speak to you. Naturally, however, I shouldn’t have said what I did if I hadn’t made up my mind during the last fortnight that I’m not disagreeable to her.”