"Ethra, you are a trump! And I don't really mind your guying me——"
"Indeed, I'm not guying you, dear friend! I'm revealing to you the actual inwardness of this entire and remarkable performance of yours. And if you don't know that you are engaging me to finish this young girl's education while you're making up your mind about your sentiments concerning her, then it's time you did."
"That is utterly——"
"Please! And it's all the truer because you don't believe it! ... Jim, the girl really is a pathetic figure—simple, sweet, intelligent, and touchingly honest.... And I'll say another thing.... God knows what mother bore her, what parents are responsible for this young thing—with her delicate features and slender body. But it was not from a pair of unhappy nobodies she inherited her mind, which seems to seek instinctively what is fine and right amid the sordid complexities of the only world she has ever known.
"As for her heart, Jim, it is the heart of a child—with one heavenly and exaggerated idol completely filling it. You! ... And I tell you very plainly that, if I were a man, the knowledge of this would frighten me a little, and make me rather more serious than many men are inclined to be."
He bit his lip and looked out across the southern valley, where already the August haze was growing bluer, blurring the low-hanging sun.
She laid a friendly, intimate, half humorous hand on his arm:
"In all right-thinking men the boy can never die. No experience born of pain, no cynicism, no incredulity acquired through disappointment, can kill the boy in any man until it has first slain his soul. Otherwise, chivalry in the world had long since become extinct.
"You have done what you could do for Philippa. I am really glad to help you, Jim. But from now on, be very careful and very sure of yourself. Because now your real responsibility begins."
He had not thought of it in that way. And now he did not care to.