“You see,” he said, and his abrupt fall to an almost disconcerting intimacy was the truest compliment such a highly practical man could have paid her, “you see, I don’t pretend to be one of the fancy sort. No Eton and Oxford for me. At your age, my dear, I was earning my thirty shillings a week at the carpenter’s bench and thinking myself almighty lucky to be getting it.”
She actually had the wit to reward the reminiscence with a ripe Galsworthian “Really!” But again she must have fallen short of the rich quality of her mentor, since my lord went on, for all the world as if she had not been a marquis’s daughter, “You don’t know, my dear, what I’ve had to fight against. Most of you young ladies laugh at men like me, but you are one of the sensible kind, so that’s why I don’t mind telling you of my early life.”
The gray eyes smiled at Lord Duckingfield. And as the stage-manager had fixed an electric bulb at a psychological angle midway between the two chairs, so that its rays caught the light of those eyes and set it dancing, Lord Duckingfield was suddenly and acutely aware of quite the sharpest thrill he had ever experienced.
“Of course, I’m very rich now.” Lord Duckingfield seemed inclined to carry naïveté to the verge of indelicacy. “Very rich indeed. Your father will make allowances for that. But you are such a very nice little girl that even had you been just plain Miss Brown....”
With a shiver, half enchantment, half dismay, Girlie realized that a sympathetic hand had put forth from the adjacent chair and that it was exquisitely enclosing hers. The close-breathing pause which followed must have meant embarrassment for both, had either been in a condition to respond to that form of emotion. But Girlie had burnt her boats. She was past all caring. As for Lord Duckingfield he was now suddenly alive to the fact that he was quite in love with this pretty gray-eyed mouse.
“You are so sensible.” The grip tightened upon the slender arm. “There’s no nonsense about you. If you don’t mind my saying so you are not at all like most of the smart girls I’ve met. They are so knowing. And they take so much living up to—for an old duffer like me. Give me something homely and sensible.” Inch by inch the wicker chair came closer. She felt one arm, half chivalrous, half masterful, slowly encircle her.
She made no effort to repel this audacity. Somehow it marched with her own state of mind. But in the next moment something had happened, something which had the effect of bringing her up short in the midst of her folly and incidentally of summoning her northern forbears primly upon the scene. Lord Duckingfield took her in his arms and kissed her.
It was the first time in Girlie’s life of twenty years that such a thing had happened or had seemed likely to happen. Nothing could have been more subversive of her strait “high-brow” code than to be kissed by a man, and a rather elderly man, without so much as a by-your-leave, in circumstances of semi-publicity. Even if she had a sense of having dined, deep down she knew it to be an epic moment; she was thrilled as she had never been thrilled; it was the event of her life. He might be a real live peer of the realm; all the same his boldness was just a little too much for Miss Cass of Laxton.
Involuntarily she stiffened, involuntarily she drew her chair a few paces away from him. Slightly abashed but wholly impenitent Lord Duckingfield followed her. But Miss Cass of Laxton was not quite lost to a sense of her high destiny. What kind of man was this! How dare he! She must let him know that this was not the form of a budding Charlotte Brontë.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, as soon as the mild horror in her eyes had convicted him. He spoke so nicely, so gently, that it was not in her heart to be angry even had it been in her nature to be so.