He turned dumbly to me, and held out his hand.
The worst of these inarticulate and undemonstrative people is that they hurt you so.
[CHAPTER FOUR.]
A TRIAL TRIP.
Three days later I introduced Robert Chalmers Fordyce into the bosom of my family. I had declined to give them any previous information about him, beyond a brief warning that they would find him "rather Scotch."
I have always found it utterly impossible to foretell from a man's behaviour towards his own sex how he will comport himself in the presence of females. I have known a raw youth, hitherto regarded as the hobbledehoy of the shooting-party and the pariah of the smoking-room, lord it among the ladies like a very lion; and I have seen the hero of a hundred fights, the master of men, the essence of intrepid resolution, stand quaking outside a drawing-room door. The début of Robin, then, I awaited with considerable interest. I expected on the whole to see him tongue-tied, especially before Dolly and Dilly. On the other hand he might be aggressively assertive.
He was neither. He proved to be that rarest of types—the man who has no fear of his fellow-creatures, male or female, singly or in battalions. Our sex is so accustomed to squaring its shoulders, pulling down its waistcoat, and assuming an engaging expression as a preliminary to an encounter with the fair, that the spectacle of a man who enters a strange drawing-room and shakes hands quietly and naturally all round, without twisting his features into an agreeable smile and mumbling entirely inarticulate words of rapture, always arouses in me feelings of envy and respect.
We found Kitty and the Twins picturesquely grouped upon the drawing-room hearth-rug, waiting for the luncheon gong.
I introduced Robin to my wife, in the indistinct and throaty tones which always obtrude themselves into an Englishman's utterance when he is called upon to say something formal but graceful. Kitty greeted the guest with a smile with which I am well acquainted (and which I can guarantee from personal experience to be absolutely irresistible on one's first experience of it), and welcomed him to the house very prettily.