"The sea is rather rough," he said. "You seem to be a good sailor."
"Yes, I am. My father had a yacht and my mother and I always went when he cruised."
This slightest glimpse of personal history—the first she had vouchsafed—the first slight lifting of the curtain which hung between them, aroused his latent curiosity.
What else lay behind that delicate, opaque veil which covered the nineteen years of her? What had been the childhood, the earlier life of this young girl whom he had found living alone with a maid and a single servant at an obscure heath outside of London?
Gently born, gently bred young girls of aristocratic precedents, don't do that sort of thing. Even if they desire to try it, they are not permitted. Also they don't go on the stage, as a rule.
Neither the sign manual, the sign visible of the theatre, nor yet that occult indefinable something characteristic of the footlights appeared to taint her personality.
Talented as she was undoubtedly, cultured and gently nurtured, the sum total of all her experience, her schooling, her development, and her art had resulted only in a charming harmony, not a personality aggressively accented in any single particular. Any drawing-room in any country might have contained this young girl. Homes which possess drawing-rooms breed the self-possession, the serenity, the soft voice, the winsome candour and directness of such girls as she.
She was curled up in the corner of the sofa where he had placed behind her the two pillows from the bed, and her winning blue eyes rested every few minutes upon this young man whom she had known only a few hours and whom she already, in her heart and in her mind, was calling a friend.
She had never had any among young men—never even among older men had she experienced the quiet security, the untroubled certainty of such a friendship as had begun now—as had suddenly stepped into her life, new, yet strangely familiar—a friendship that seemed instantly fully developed and satisfactory.
There appeared to be no room for doubt about it, no occasion for waiting, no uncertainty in her mind, no inclination and no thought of the lesser conventionalities which must strew elaborately the path of first acquaintance with the old, old-fashioned garlands—those prim, stiff blossoms of discretion, of propriety, of self-conscious concession to formula and tradition.