“The devil!”
“Yes, thenk you, m’lud. And would m’lady prefer the toasted muffins?”
M’lady preferred nothing so much as the open enjoyment of m’lud’s discomfiture. There was a certain boldness and a certain shyness about m’lud, typical of England. At present the awkward self-consciousness was to the fore. It was consuming him, although he was intelligent enough to know exactly his trouble and its remedy. Therefore he laughed, owned up to the embarrassment and summoned his will to fight it down.
“Even Half-English is still very English,” she told him, after she had explained carefully that his face had flushed and that the tips of his ears were quite red—all more or less comforting. In the give and take of raillery that followed he almost recovered.
“The worst thing I have to contend with is this engulfing shyness of mine,” he explained finally. “And the worst symptom of shyness, perhaps you know, is anger and sullenness. It knocks the speech out of me. That makes me hot and angry. Then I’m apt to insult my neighbour, and then it’s all off.... But I’m all right now.”
“Yes,” she helped herself to a hot muffin; “you’ve gone through all the phases, except that you began by insulting your neighbour.”
“How, pray?”
He was quite unconscious of any guilt. She saw that, so she preferred not to give her hand away by explaining; yet, somehow, his half-joking reference to her “charming village qualities” rankled. Her forebears had been York State farmers, then vineyard workers and finally prosperous share-holders in the industry of raising and marketing of grapes and grape products. Although the present generation of children had gone to boarding-school and to college, had travelled and were accustomed to shop in New York city, yet the fine touch of the open country had never left them. That was their abiding charm, if they only knew it; it gave them a heartiness and a frankness and an independence of bearing and speech that marked them with distinction. Occasionally, however, in some social grouping of metropolitan dwellers they had been brought to feel a lack and were on the alert to turn even gentle compliment into ironic criticism. The young man with his patronizing air should be punished.
“Never mind,” she turned away his sincere questionings. “If you aren’t aware of the insult, we’ll forget it and call it bad manners. Bad manners are nobody’s fault.” The English servant was approaching with the meat course, so she added a gracious and distinct “dearie.”
“Ugh!” he grunted. “I detest that word. I’d rather be called ‘birdie.’”