The duke’s eyes lighted anew.
“She had her reasons,” he said.
“She laid ’em out as if she’d been my mother instead of a little red-headed angel. She didn’t waste a word,—just told me what I was up against. She’d lived in the village with her grandmother, and she knew. She said I’d got to come and find out for myself what no one else could teach me. She told me about the kind of girls I’d see—beauties that were different from anything I’d ever seen before. And it was up to me to see all of them—the best of them.”
“Ladies?” interjected the duke, gently.
“Yes. With titles like those in novels, she said, and clothes like the ‘Woman’s Pictorial.’ The kind of girls, she said, that would make her look like a housemaid. Housemaid be darned!” he exclaimed, suddenly growing hot. “I’ve seen the whole lot of them, I’ve done my darndest to get next, and there’s not one—” he stopped short. “Why should any of them look at me, anyhow?” he added suddenly.
“That was not her point,” remarked the duke. “She wanted you to look at them, and you have looked.” T. Tembarom’s eagerness was inspiring to behold.
“I have, haven’t I?” he cried. “That was what I wanted to ask you. I’ve done as she said. I haven’t shirked a thing. I’ve followed them around when I knew they hadn’t any use on earth for me. Some of them have handed me the lemon pretty straight. Why shouldn’t they? But I don’t believe she knew how tough it might be for a fellow sometimes.”
“No, she did not,” the duke said.
To his hearer Palliser’s story became an amusing thing, read in the light of this most delicious frankness. It was Palliser himself who had played the fool, and not T. Tembarom, who had simply known what he wanted, and had, with businesslike directness, applied himself to finding a method of obtaining it. The young women he gave his time to must be “Ladies” because Miss Hutchinson had required it from him. The female flower of the noble houses had been passed in review before him to practise upon, so to speak. The handsomer they were, the more dangerously charming, the better Miss Hutchinson would be pleased. And he had been regarded as a presumptuous aspirant! It was a situation for a comedy. But the “Ladies” would not enjoy it if they were told. It was also not the Duke of Stone who would tell them.
In courts he had learned to wear a composed countenance when he was prompted to smile, and he wore one now. He enjoyed the society of T. Tembarom increasingly every hour. He provided him with every joy.