“Not in the least. A reporter may be just an ordinary human being, off duty, you know.”
“Are you just an ordinary human being?”
“Very much so. Don’t I strike you that way?” His tone was one of exaggerated anxiety.
The girl studied him with impersonal interest, quite free from embarrassment. Magnus Laurens had credited him with good looks. In the usual sense, Miss Ames decided, confirming her first opinion, he was not entitled to this credit. He was rather rugged of build and face, with mobile lips, boyish and pleasant eyes, an obstinate jaw which looked as if it might set to courage and endurance or perhaps to sullenness, and the expression and bearing of one vividly and intelligently curious about the life-scheme of which he was a part. The girl noted, with approval, his dress: quietly harmonious in every detail yet without suggesting the finicky habit; a style which would have been unremarkable in New York or London, but which stood out with a pleasant distinction among the more casual and careless garb of the Middle West.
“I really had not given it much thought,” she answered, having completed her scrutiny. “Your methods seem rather out of the ordinary.”
“Are you a million years old?” he asked abruptly.
If his intention was to startle her, it failed signally. “Surely that is a very personal question. I am not—quite. Why do you ask?”
“Because you look so like a kid and yet you’ve got the nerve—no, not nerve—the confidence and manner of your own great-grandmother. It’s very confusing,” complained young Mr. Robson, leaning dejectedly upon the gate.
“Perhaps it arrives from my having been brought up abroad and much among older people,” she surmised, with one of her slightly un-English turns of phrase. “One reason for my coming here to the University is to accustom myself to your American ways.”
“‘Your’ American ways?”