“I never heard of a duchess building airships.”
“It’s the duke who is going to do the building. The particular hobo I’m figuring on has got to take a hand in all sorts of stunts at this moment of the world’s progress which will make his distinguished forbears turn in their graves, no doubt. It seems to me he’s got to do a single on the big time, as they say in vaudeville, and the finest girl in the western hemisphere must keep him up to his job.”
“‘Some’ talk,” said Mary, with a smile rather drawn and constrained.
“You see”—the force of his candor amused her considerably—“I’ve drawn a big prize in the lottery, and if I let myself be robbed of it by other people’s tomfool tricks, I’m a guy, a dead-beat, an out and out dud.”
“But don’t you see,” she urged, laughing a little, although suffering bitterly, “how cruel it would be for them, poor souls? We must think of them a little.”
“Why should they come in at all?”
“I really think they ought, poor dears. After all, they stand for something.” She recalled their former talk on this vexed subject.
“What do they stand for?—that’s the point. They are an inbred lot, a mass of conceit and silly prejudice. I’m sorry to give them away like this, but, after all, they are only very distant relations to whom I owe nothing, and they have a trick of annoying me unspeakably.”
“I won’t have you say such things.” The stern line of a truly adorable mouth was a delight, a challenge. “You are one of them, whether you want to be or whether you don’t, and it’s your duty to stand by them. Noblesse oblige, you know.”
“And that means a scrupulous respect for the feelings of other people, if it means anything. No, let us see things as they are and come down to bedrock.” And as the Tenderfoot spoke after this manner, he took a hand of hers in each of his in a fashion at once whimsical, delicate, and loverlike. Somehow he had the power to put an enchantment upon her. “You’ve got to marry me whatever happens.”