The
heat increased in a reddish haze through which the sun poured like
molten copper. "You'd better come inside," he said from the doorway;
"the house, shut up, is quite comfortable." Within the damp of the old,
stone walls made a comparative coolness. The shades were drawn down, and
they sat in an untimely twilight.
"When I think of how energetic Eliza will be," Mariana asserted, "I am
already overwhelmed. But you never look hot, Howat; you are always
beautiful." His flannels and straw-coloured silk coat were crisply
ironed; his hair, his scarf and lustrous yellow shoes, precise. "Howat,"
she continued almost anxiously, "you put a lot on, well--good form. You
think that the way a man knots his tie is tremendously significant--"
"Perhaps," he returned cautiously. "A good many years have shown me that
the right man usually wears the right things."
"Couldn't that be just the smallest bit unfair? Aren't there, after
all, droves of the right men in rubber collars? I don't know any," she
added hastily; "that is, not exactly the same. But it seems to me that
you have lived so exclusively in a certain atmosphere that you might
have got blinded to--to other things."
"Perhaps," he said again, complacently. "I can only judge by my own
feeling and experience.
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