“The difference”—Hugh wanted it so adorably definite—“that you didn’t see your way to accepting——?”
“No, not to accepting the condition he named.”
“Which was that he’d keep the picture for you if you’d treat me as too ‘low’——?”
“If I’d treat you,” said Lady Grace with her eyes on his fine young face, “as impossible.”
He kept her eyes—he clearly liked so to make her repeat it. “And not even for the sake of the picture—?” After he had given her time, however, her silence, with her beautiful look in it, seemed to admonish him not to force her for his pleasure; as if what she had already told him didn’t make him throb enough for the wonder of it. He had it, and let her see by his high flush how he made it his own—while, the next thing, as it was but part of her avowal, the rest of that illumination called for a different intelligence. “Your father’s reprobation of me personally is on the ground that you’re all such great people?”
She spared him the invidious answer to this as, a moment before, his eagerness had spared her reserve; she flung over the “ground” that his question laid bare the light veil of an evasion, “‘Great people,’ I’ve learned to see, mustn’t—to remain great—do what my father’s doing.”
“It’s indeed on the theory of their not so behaving,” Hugh returned, “that we see them—all the inferior rest of us—in the grand glamour of their greatness!”
If he had spoken to meet her admirable frankness half-way, that beauty in her almost brushed him aside to make at a single step the rest of the journey. “You won’t see them in it for long—if they don’t now, under such tests and with such opportunities, begin to take care.”
This had given him, at a stroke, he clearly felt, all freedom for the closer criticism. “Lord Theign perhaps recognises some such canny truth, but ‘takes care,’ with the least trouble to himself and the finest short cut—does it, if you’ll let me say so, rather on the cheap—by finding ‘the likes’ of me, as his daughter’s trusted friend, out of the question.”
“Well, you won’t mind that, will you?” Lady Grace asked, “if he finds his daughter herself, in any such relation to you, quite as much so.”