Hearing those words spoken of her father, Nedda flushed.
“Yes, he is,” she said fervently.
Her new acquaintance went on:
“He's got the gift of truth—can laugh at himself as well as others; that's what makes him precious. These humming-birds here to-night couldn't raise a smile at their own tomfoolery to save their silly souls.”
He spoke still in that voice of smothery wrath, and Nedda thought: 'He IS nice!'
“They've been talking about 'the Land'”—he raised his hands and ran them through his palish hair—“'the Land!' Heavenly Father! 'The Land!' Why! Look at that fellow!”
Nedda looked and saw a man, like Richard Coeur de Lion in the history books, with a straw-colored moustache just going gray.
“Sir Gerald Malloring—hope he's not a friend of yours! Divine right of landowners to lead 'the Land' by the nose! And our friend Britto!”
Nedda, following his eyes, saw a robust, quick-eyed man with a suave insolence in his dark, clean-shaved face.
“Because at heart he's just a supercilious ruffian, too cold-blooded to feel, he'll demonstrate that it's no use to feel—waste of valuable time—ha! valuable!—to act in any direction. And that's a man they believe things of. And poor Henry Wiltram, with his pathetic: 'Grow our own food—maximum use of the land as food-producer, and let the rest take care of itself!' As if we weren't all long past that feeble individualism; as if in these days of world markets the land didn't stand or fall in this country as a breeding-ground of health and stamina and nothing else. Well, well!”