"Great that we're cousins--'great'?" It had broken her stillness happily and, as he figured, without the jostle of her arm; for again it not only left her intrusion ideally unchallenged, but instantly gave it such importance of ground as could in no way whatever be taken from it.
"Well, what _I_ call great," he returned in the liveliest promptitude of explanation; well aware, on the second thought, that it was one of the wrong kinds of turns, one of those that had made the rest of the family exchange wonderments, but eager, within the moment, to be able to judge whether it hadn't perhaps even positively pleased her.
"He calls things in such ways as you've never heard," Perry declared to her as for further and possibly still more convenient information; which Ralph, rejoicing at the comparative sociability of it, straightway took up.
"Of course I do, I know it at once as soon as I've done it, know it by the sound after, _after_, don't you see?"--he addressed the earnest emphasis only to the girl. "Of course we have different expressions--but I'm going to make _you_ like them. I'm going to make you understand them," he explained in the most serious way.
The happiest thing was that though her appearance had determined in him this sudden earnestness, the confidence shown in her and so quickly heaped up made her break into a smile. "I'm not supposed to understand unless I very much want to. Therefore----!" She only smiled, but it gave Ralph an immediate chance.
"Therefore it's clear that you want to so far as I'm concerned; which it's a grand comfort to feel--for I'm not in the least afraid."
"What have you to be afraid of?" she asked with a readiness that made her brother break in before Ralph could reply.
"You understand between you then, damme, things that I don't!" Which comment, looking from one to the other, he at once and most surprisingly backed up. "You've smashed the great jar at Drydown, and he already knows it, and that you've come up to make your confession."
"Oh I don't in the least know _that!_" Ralph declared. "What I should like to believe," he said to the girl, "is that you've wanted so to see your new kinsman that you've risked the adventure." His rejoicing gravity was at such a pitch in it that she turned, under this address, from pale to red, and that something in the expression thus produced in her, which was like a rush of some purer intelligence than he had yet touched among them all, determined in him the strangest inward cry. "Why she's modern, _modern!_" he felt he was thinking--and it seemed to launch him with one push on an extraordinary sea. He in fact wouldn't have been sure the next moment whether he hadn't uttered the queer words, queer, in their sense, even to his own apprehension; though he was afterwards to take it that they had appeared to find no echo, even if he had himself kept on knowing for the moment more or less what he meant by them.