With which, while the young man kept his arms folded and his hands tucked away as for compression of his personal extent and weight, they exchanged, at their close range, the most lingering look yet. Extraordinary to him, in the gravity of this relation, his deeper impression of something beautiful and spreadingly clear—very much as if the wide window and the quiet clean sea and the finer sunset light had all had, for assistance and benediction, their word to say to it. They seemed to combine most to remark together "What an exquisite person is your uncle!" This is what he had for the minute the sense of taking from them, and the expression of his assent to it was in the tone of his next rejoinder. "If I could only know what it is you'd most like——!"
"Never mind what I most like—only tell me, only tell me," his companion again said: "You can't say anything that won't absolutely suit me; in fact I defy you to, though you mayn't at all see why that's the case. I've got you—without a flaw. So!" Mr. Betterman triumphantly breathed. Gray's sense was by this time of his being examined and appraised as never in his life before—very much as in the exposed state of an important "piece," an object of value picked, for finer estimation, from under containing glass. There was nothing then but to face it, unless perhaps also to take a certain comfort in his being, as he might feel, practically clean and in condition. That such an hour had its meaning, and that the meaning might be great for him, this of course surged softly in, more and more, from every point of the circle that held him; but with the consciousness making also more at each moment for an uplifting, a fantastic freedom, a sort of sublime simplification, in which nothing seemed to depend on him or to have at any time so depended. He was really face to face thus with bright immensities, and the handsome old presence from which, after a further moment, a hand had reached forth a little to take his own, guaranteed by the quietest of gestures at once their truth and the irrelevance, as he could only feel it, of their scale. Cool and not weak, to his responsive grasp, this retaining force, to which strength was added by what next came. "It's not for myself, it's not for myself—I mean your being as I say. What do I matter now except to have recognised it? No, Graham—it's in another connection." Was the connection then with Rosanna? Graham had time to wonder, and even to think what a big thing this might make of it, before his uncle brought out: "It's for the world."
"The world?"—Gray's vagueness again reigned.
"Well, our great public."
"Oh your great public——!"
The exclamation, the cry of alarm, even if also of amusement in face of such a connection as that, quickened for an instant the good touch of the cool hand. "That's the way I like you to sound. It's the way she told me you would—I mean that would be natural to you. And it's precisely why—being the awful great public it is—we require the difference that you'll make. So you see you're for our people."
Poor Graham's eyes widened. "I shall make a difference for your people——?"
But his uncle serenely went on. "Don't think you know them yet, or what it's like over here at all. You may think so and feel you're prepared. But you don't know till you've had the whole thing up against you."
"May I ask, sir," Gray smiled, "what you're talking about?"
His host met his eyes on it, but let it drop. "You'll see soon enough for yourself. Don't mind what I say. That isn't the thing for you now—it's all done. Only be true," said Mr. Betterman. "You are and, as I've said, can't help yourself." With which he relapsed again to one of his good conclusions. "And after all don't mind the public either."