第35章

She's the best.They don't make them any better than that, and just think, if she's like that now, what will she be when she's grown up, when she's learned a few things? Now her sister.You can see just what her sister will be at thirty, and at fifty, and at eighty.She's thoroughbred and she's the most beautiful woman to look at I ever saw--but, my son--she is too careful.She hasn't any illusions, and no sense of humor.And a woman with no illusions and no sense of humor is going to be monotonous.You can't teach her anything.You can't imagine yourself telling her anything she doesn't know.The things we think important don't reach her at all.They're not in her line, and in everything else she knows more than we could ever guess at.But that Miss Hope! It's a privilege to show her about.She wants to see everything, and learn everything, and she goes poking her head into openings and down shafts like a little fox terrier.

And she'll sit still and listen with her eyes wide open and tears in them, too, and she doesn't know it--until you can't talk yourself for just looking at her.''

Clay rose and moved on to the house in silence.He was glad that MacWilliams had interrupted him when he did.He wondered whether he understood Alice Langham after all.He had seen many fine ladies before during his brief visits to London, and Berlin, and Vienna, and they had shown him favor.He had known other women not so fine.Spanish-American senoritas through Central and South America, the wives and daughters of English merchants exiled along the Pacific coast, whose fair skin and yellow hair whitened and bleached under the hot tropical suns.He had known many women, and he could have quoted``Trials and troubles amany, Have proved me;One or two women, God bless them!

Have loved me.''

But the woman he was to marry must have all the things he lacked.

She must fill out and complete him where he was wanting.This woman possessed all of these things.She appealed to every ambition and to every taste he cherished, and yet he knew that he had hesitated and mistrusted her, when he should have declared himself eagerly and vehemently, and forced her to listen with all the strength of his will.

Miss Langham dropped among the soft cushions of the launch with a sense of having been rescued from herself and of delight in finding refuge again in her own environment.The sight of King standing in the bow beside Hope with his cigarette hanging from his lips, and peering with half-closed eyes into the fading light, gave her a sense of restfulness and content.She did not know what she wished from that other strange young man.He was so bold, so handsome, and he looked at life and spoke of it in such a fresh, unhackneyed spirit.He might make himself anything he pleased.But here was a man who already had everything, or who could get it as easily as he could increase the speed of the launch, by pulling some wire with his finger.

She recalled one day when they were all on board of this same launch, and the machinery had broken down, and MacWilliams had gone forward to look at it.He had called Clay to help him, and she remembered how they had both gone down on their knees and asked the engineer and fireman to pass them wrenches and oil-cans, while King protested mildly, and the rest sat helplessly in the hot glare of the sea, as the boat rose and fell on the waves.She resented Clay's interest in the accident, and his pleasure when he had made the machinery right once more, and his appearance as he came back to them with oily hands and with his face glowing from the heat of the furnace, wiping his grimy fingers on a piece of packing.She had resented the equality with which he treated the engineer in asking his advice, and it rather surprised her that the crew saluted him when he stepped into the launch again that night as though he were the owner.She had expected that they would patronize him, and she imagined after this incident that she detected a shade of difference in the manner of the sailors toward Clay, as though he had cheapened himself to them--as he had to her.