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She measured her inconsistency, but was not abashed. “We’re not talking of what I can meet.” Yet she found relief in dropping the point. “Why doesn’t he stand himself?”
“Like other devouring wolves, he’s not personally adored.”
“Only to you? You are personally adored; you will be still more if you stand; and that, you poor lamb, is why he wants you!”
The young man accepted gracefully the burden her sympathy imposed. “I’m the bearer of my name, the representative of my family. My family and my name have been for generations indulgently attached to this countryside.”
She listened to him with a kind of passion. “You do of course what you will with the countryside!”
“Yes—if we do it as genuine Yules. I’m obliged to grant you that your genuine Yule’s a Tory of Tories. It’s Mr. Prodmore’s belief that I should carry Gossage in that character, but in that character only. They won’t look at me in any other.”
It might have taxed a spectator to say in what character Mrs. Gracedew considered him. “Don’t be too sure of people’s not looking at you!”
He blushed. “We must leave out my personal beauty.”
“We can’t! Don’t we take in Mr. Prodmore’s?”
“Call him beautiful?”
“Hideous.” She settled it. “What’s the extraordinary interest that he attaches––?”
“To the return of a Tory? His desire is born of his fear—his terror on behalf of Property, which he sees, somehow, with an intensely Personal ‘P.’ He has a great deal of that article, and very little of anything else.”
Mrs. Gracedew had one of her friendly recalls. “Do you call that nice daughter ‘very little’?”
The young man looked quite at a loss. “Is she very big? I really didn’t notice her—and moreover she’s just a part of the Property. He thinks things are going too far.”
She sat straight down on a stiff chair. “Well, they are!”
He stood before her in discomposure. “Aren’t you then a lover of justice?”
“A passionate one! Where’s the justice of your losing this house? To keep Covering, you must carry Gossage!”
The odd face he made might have betrayed a man dazzled. “As a renegade?”
“As a genuine Yule. What business have you to be anything else? You must close with Mr. Prodmore—you must stand in the Tory interest.” She hung fire a moment; then as she got up: “If you will, I’ll conduct your canvass!”
He stared at the distracting picture. “That puts the temptation high!”
But she brushed the mere picture away. “Ah, don’t look at me as if I were the temptation! Look at this sweet old human home. Do you want to know what they do to me? They speak to me for Mr. Prodmore.”
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