It was she who “conversed” during their walk, and while she trotted by Tembarom’s side, looking more early-Victorian than ever in a neat, fringed mantle and a small black bonnet of a fashion long decently interred by a changing world, Tembarom had never seen anything resembling it in New York; but he liked it and her increasingly at every moment.
It was he who made her converse. He led her on by asking her questions and being greatly interested in every response she made. In fact, though he was quite unaware of the situation, she was creating for him such an atmosphere as he might have found in a book, if he had had the habit of books. Everything she told him was new and quaint and very often rather touching. She remembered things about herself and her poor little past without knowing she was doing it. Before they had talked an hour he had an astonishing clear idea of “poor dear papa” and “dearest Emily” and “poor darling mama” and existence at Rowcroft Vicarage. He “caught on to” the fact that though she was very much given to the word “dear,”—people were “dear,” and so were things and places,—she never even by chance slipped into saying “dear Rowcroft,” which she would certainly have done if she had ever spent a happy moment in it. As she talked to him he realized that her simple accustomedness to English village life and its accompaniments of county surroundings would teach him anything and everything he might want to know. Her obscurity had been surrounded by stately magnificence, with which she had become familiar without touching the merest outskirts of its privileges. She knew names and customs and families and things to be cultivated or avoided, and though she would be a little startled and much mystified by his total ignorance of all she had breathed in since her birth, he felt sure that she would not regard him either with private contempt or with a lessened liking because he was a vandal pure and simple.
And she had such a nice, little, old polite way of saying things. When, in passing a group of children, he failed to understand that their hasty bobbing up and down meant that they were doing obeisance to him as lord of the manor, she spoke with the prettiest apologetic courtesy.
“I’m sure you won’t mind touching your hat when they make their little curtsies, or when a villager touches his forehead,” she said.
“Good Lord! no,” he said, starting. “Ought I? I didn’t know they were doing it at me.” And he turned round and made a handsome bow and grinned almost affectionately at the small, amazed party, first puzzling, and then delighting, them, because he looked so extraordinarily friendly. A gentleman who laughed at you like that ought to be equal to a miscellaneous distribution of pennies in the future, if not on the spot. They themselves grinned and chuckled and nudged one another, with stares and giggles.
“I am sorry to say that in a great many places the villagers are not nearly so respectful as they used to be,” Miss Alicia explained. “In Rowcroft the children were very remiss about curtseying. It’s quite sad. But Mr. Temple Barholm was very strict indeed in the matter of demanding proper respectfulness. He has turned men off their farms for incivility. The villagers of Temple Barholm have much better manners than some even a few miles away.”
“Must I tip my hat to all of them?” he asked.
“If you please. It really seems kinder. You—you needn’t quite lift it, as you did to the children just now. If you just touch the brim lightly with your hand in a sort of military salute—that is what they are accustomed to.”
After they had passed through the village street she paused at the end of a short lane and looked up at him doubtfully.