After a while he spoke again, almost mechanically:
"I'm trying to think how we can best be on equal terms, Jacqueline. That is all. After your work is done here, I want to see you here and elsewhere--I want you to come back at intervals, as my guest. Other people will ask you. Other people must be here, too, when you are. I know some who will accept you on your merits--if you are properly chaperoned. That is all I am thinking about. It's fairer to you."
But even to himself his motive was not clear--only the rather confused idea persisted that women in his own world knew how to take care of themselves, whatever they chose to do about it--that Jacqueline would stand a fairer chance with herself, and with him, whatever his intentions might really be. It would be a squarer deal, that was all.
She sat thinking, one slim forefinger crook'd under her chin; and he saw her blue eyes deep in thought, and the errant lock curling against her cheek. Then she raised her head and looked at him:
A moment later Farris announced luncheon. A swarm of cats greeted them at the door, purring and waiving multi-coloured tails, and escorted them to the table, from whence they knew came the delectable things calculated to satisfy the inner cat.
The countryside adjacent to Silverwood was eminently and self-consciously respectable. The fat, substantial estates still belonged to families whose forefathers had first taken title to them. There were, of course, a number of "colonial" houses, also a "colonial" inn, The Desboro Arms, built to look as genuine as possible, although only two years old, steam heated, and electric lighted.
But things "colonial" were the traditional capital of Silverwood, and its thrifty and respectable inhabitants meant to maintain the "atmosphere." To that end they had solemnly subscribed a very small sum for an inn sign to swing in front of The Desboro Arms; the wheelwright painted it; somebody fired a shotgunful of antiquity into it, and American weather was rapidly doing the rest, with a gratifying result which no degenerate European weather could have accomplished in half a century of rain and sunshine.
The majority of the mansions in Silverwood township were as inoffensively commonplace as the Desboro house. Few pre-Revolutionary structures survived; the British had burned the countryside from Major Lockwood's mansion at Pound Ridge all the way to Bedford Village and across to the Connecticut line. With few exceptions, Silverwood houses had shared the common fate when Tarleton and DeLancy galloped amuck among the Westchester hills; but here and there some sad old mansion still remained and was reverently cherished, as was also the graveyard, straggling up the hill, set with odd old headstones, upon which most remarkable cherubim smirked under a gladly permitted accumulation of lichen.