“Yes, I am—but so is she.” He set his hard young jaw, and stared once more at the velvet shadows.
“I tell you, for a fellow that knows nothing this novel-reading is an easy way of finding out a lot of things,” he resumed. “You find out what different kinds of people there are, and what different kinds of ways. If you’ve lived in one place, and been up against nothing but earning your living, you think that’s all there is of it—that it’s the whole thing. But it isn’t, by gee!” His air became thoughtful. “I’ve begun to kind of get on to what all this means”—glancing about him—“to you people; and how a fellow like T. T. must look to you. I’ve always sort of guessed, but reading a few dozen novels has helped me to see why it’s that way. I’ve yelled right out laughing over it many a time. That fellow called Thackeray—I can’t read his things right straight through—but he’s an eye-opener.”
“You have tried nothing but novels?” his enthralled hearer inquired.
“Not yet. I shall come to the others in time. I’m sort of hungry for these things about people. It’s the ways they’re different that gets me going.
“Reading novels put me wise to things in a new way. Lady Joan’s been wiping her feet on me hard for a good while, and I sort of made up my mind I’d got to let her until I was sure where I was. I won’t say I didn’t mind it, but I could stand it. But once when she caught me looking at her, the way she looked back at me made me see all of a sudden that it would be easier for her if I told her straight that she was mistaken.”
“That she is mistaken in thinking—?”
“What she does think. She wouldn’t have thought it if the old lady hadn’t been driving her mad by hammering it in. She’d have hated me all right, and I don’t blame her when I think of how poor Jem was treated; but she wouldn’t have thought that every time I tried to be decent and friendly to her I was butting in and making a sick fool of myself. She’s got to stay where her mother keeps her, and she’s got to listen to her. Oh, hell! She’s got to be told!”
The duke set the tips of his fingers together. “How would you do it?” he asked.
“Just straight,” replied T. Tembarom. “There’s no other way.”