“Men?” the Duke had smiled. He couldn’t somehow think of this tall gentle girl as a woman of the same age as his wife. She verily quite charmed him. Once or twice, indeed, he couldn’t help but pity Leonora Mall for the way she had let life so quickly polish her freshness into that worldliness which he, for one, found so unsympathetic in women.
“Men, Miss Lamb? And what, if you’ll forgive me, do you know of men?”
“Enough surely, surely!”
“But that sounds quite threatening! Have you, then, hunted men in jungles and caught them, caged them and watched them?”
“But, Duke, wouldn’t I, surely, have been married by now if I knew nothing of men?”
“Oh, well caught! But, Miss Lamb, you haven’t married probably just because, like all rare people, you’re—well, fastidious!”
“Oh, I don’t know! Maybe. Fastidious is a long word, Duke, and I seem to have been waiting a long time, so maybe you’re right. But I don’t know....”
“May I say, then, that you’ve been very wise? So much wiser than many quite sensible men, so much wiser than many beautiful women. I mean, to wait.”
“But aren’t we all,” she pleaded, “always waiting?”
“Some of us, unfortunately,” the Duke said grimly, “haven’t. I, Miss Lamb, didn’t wait long enough.”