“That delightful young man will shortly become my closest intimate,” he said. “He not only keeps up my spirits, but he opens up vistas. Vistas after a man’s seventy-second birthday!”
“I like him first rate,” Tembarom said to Miss Alicia. “I liked him the minute he got up laughing like an old sport when he fell out of the pony carriage.”
As he became more intimate with him, he liked him still better. Obscured though it was by airy, elderly persiflage, he began to come upon a background of stability and points of view wholly to be relied on in his new acquaintance. It had evolved itself out of long and varied experience with the aid of brilliant mentality. The old peer’s reasons were always logical. He laughed at most things, but at a few he did not laugh at all. After several of the long conversations Tembarom began to say to himself that this seemed like a man you need not be afraid to talk things over with—things you didn’t want to speak of to everybody.
“Seems to me,” he said thoughtfully to Miss Alicia, “he’s an old fellow you could tie to. I’ve got on to one thing when I’ve listened to him: he talks all he wants to and laughs a lot, but he never gives himself away. He wouldn’t give another fellow away either if he said he wouldn’t. He knows how not to.”
There was an afternoon on which, during a drive they took together, the duke was enlightened as to several points which had given him cause for reflection, among others the story beloved of Captain Palliser and his audiences.
“I guess you’ve known a good many women,” T. Tembarom remarked on this occasion after a few minutes of thought. “Living all over the world as you’ve done, you’d be likely to come across a whole raft of them one time and another.”
“A whole raft of them, one time and another,” agreed the duke. “Yes.”
“You’ve liked them, haven’t you?”
“Immensely. Sometimes a trifle disastrously. Find me a more absolutely interesting object in the universe than a woman—any woman, and I will devote the remainder of my declining years to the study of it,” answered his grace.
He said it with a decision which made T. Tembarom turn to look at him, and after his look decide to proceed.