"Choice of companionship is a matter for serious consideration. You can’t make a companion of the intellectually inferior, of one who possesses merely the lesser instincts, of any lesser nature, whether cultivated to its full extent or otherwise. You know that. We shun what is not congenial."
He looked at her very intently, the dull red still flushing his face; and she surveyed him critically, amiably, amused at his attitude, which was the epitome of everything masculine.
"What are you going to do about her?" he inquired at last.
Madame de Moidrey threw back her pretty head and laughed with delicious abandon.
"Perhaps I don’t appreciate her as deeply as you do, Jim, but I shall humbly endeavor to do so. Now, suppose, when you go back to the Golden Peach, you send Philippa’s effects up here, and in the meanwhile I’ll begin my duty of finishing Philippa’s education—for which duty, I understand, I’m engaged by you——"
"Ethra, you are a trump! And I don’t really mind your guying me——"
"Indeed, I’m not guying you, dear friend! I’m revealing to you the actual inwardness of this entire and remarkable performance of yours. And if you don’t know that you are engaging me to finish this young girl’s education while you’re making up your mind about your sentiments concerning her, then it’s time you did."
"Please! And it’s all the truer because you don’t believe it! ... Jim, the girl really _is_ a pathetic figure—simple, sweet, intelligent, and touchingly honest.... And I’ll say another thing.... God knows what mother bore her, what parents are responsible for this young thing—with her delicate features and slender body. But it was not from a pair of unhappy nobodies she inherited her mind, which seems to seek instinctively what is fine and right amid the sordid complexities of the only world she has ever known.
"As for her heart, Jim, it is the heart of a child—with one heavenly and exaggerated idol completely filling it. _You!_ ... And I tell you very plainly that, if I were a man, the knowledge of this would frighten me a little, and make me rather more serious than many men are inclined to be."
He bit his lip and looked out across the southern valley, where already the August haze was growing bluer, blurring the low-hanging sun.