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It had an instant effect on her—she almost pounced upon him. “Then you must let me put you up!”
“Up to what?”
“Up to everything! You were smoking when you came in. Where’s your cigarette?”
The young man appreciatively produced another. “I thought perhaps I mightn’t—here.”
“You may everywhere.”
He bent his head to the information. “Everywhere.”
She laughed at his docility. “It’s a rule of the house!”
He took in the place with greater pleasure. “What delightful rules!”
“How could such a house have any others? I may go up just once more—mayn’t I?—to the long gallery?”
“The long gallery?” He could not tell her.
She remembered. “I forgot you’ve never seen it. Why, it’s the leading thing about you!” She was full of the pride of showing it. “Come right up!”
Clement Yule, half seated on a table from which his long left leg nervously swung, only looked at her and smiled and smoked. “There’s a party up.”
She remembered. “So we must be the party down? Well, you must give me a chance. That long gallery’s the principal thing I came over for.”
“Where in heaven’s name did you come over from?”
“Missoura Top, where I’m building—just in this style. I came for plans and ideas,” Mrs. Gracedew serenely pursued. “I felt I must look right at you.”
“But what did you know about us?”
She kept it a moment. “Everything!”
He seemed almost afraid to touch it. “At ‘Missoura Top’?”
“Why not? It’s a growing place—forty thousand the last census. My husband left it to me.”
The young man presently changed his posture. “You’re a widow?”
Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. “A very lone woman.” Her face had the vision of a long distance. “My loneliness is great enough to want something big to hold it—and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see, I had your picture.”
“Mine?”
Her smile reassured him. “A water colour I chanced on in Boston.”
“In Boston? What has Boston heard of me?”
“It wasn’t ‘you’—it was your divine south front. The drawing struck me so that I got you up—in the books.”
“Are we in the books?”
“Did you never discover it?” Before his blankness, her frank concern sprang again to the front. “Where in heaven’s name, Captain Yule, have you come over from?”
He looked at her very kindly. “The East End of London.”
She had followed perfectly. “What were you doing there?”
“Working, you see. When I left the army—it was much too slow unless one was personally a whirlwind of war—I began to make out that, for a fighting man––”
“There’s always somebody or other to go for?” she took him up.
He considered her while he smoked. “The enemy, yes—everywhere in force. I went for him: misery and ignorance and vice—injustice and privilege and wrong. Such as you see me––”
“You’re a rabid reformer? I wish we had you at Missoura Top!”
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