“He did leave you at an anxious point, didn't he?” Halson smiled to the rest of us at Rulledge's expense, and then said: “Well, I think I can help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?”
“By sight, Minver does,” Rulledge answered for us. “Wants to paint her.” “Of course,” Halson said, with intelligence. “But I doubt if he'd find her as paintable as she looks, at first. She's beautiful, but her charm is spiritual.”
“Sometimes we try for that,” the painter interposed.
“And sometimes you get it. But you'll allow it's difficult. That's all I meant. I've known her—let me see—for twelve years, at least; ever since I first went West. She was about eleven then, and her father was bringing her up on the ranche. Her aunt came along, by and by, and took her to Europe; mother dead before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl was always homesick for the ranche; she pined for it; and after they had kept her in Germany three or four years they let her come back, and run wild again; wild as a flower does, or a vine—not a domesticated animal.”
“Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic Rulledge.”
“Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, Minver,” Halson said, almost austerely. “Her father died two years ago, and then she had to come East, for her aunt simply wouldn't live on the ranche. She brought her on, here, and brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea; but the girl didn't take to the New York thing at all; I could see it from the start; she wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about the ranche.”
“She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those conventional people.”
Halson laughed at Minver's thrust, and went on amiably: “I don't suppose that till she met Braybridge she was ever quite at her ease with any man or woman, for that matter. I imagine, as you've done, that it was his fear of her that gave her courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn't that it?”
Wanhope assented to the question referred to him with a nod.
“And when they got lost from the rest of the party at that picnic—”