"Good Lord, you don't mean to say you're a Puritan!" Mrs. Midmore quickly exclaimed, in the noblest horror.
"I guess we're all Puritans over there as compared to you," Ralph had no difficulty whatever in deciding at once to reply. "You're all high-coloured and splendidly of this world." He found a pleasure in saying it out, as he had been feeling it so from the first; besides which it was the remark of broadest application that he had yet permitted himself, and there was a degree of relief in that. This not least, either, on his seeing how it stirred Mrs. Midmore up, for nothing could be clearer than that whenever stirred up she would affect him at her grandest.
"Do you mean I don't believe in another world than this?" she asked, "when, as indeed as good a churchwoman as there is in England, I never miss a proper occasion of declaring it!"
"Well, we're Church folk too in New York, thank God," Ralph said, "but we've scarcely a church that you'd know from a conventicle, and don't you see how even in this elegant talk with yourselves I can scarce keep down my own snuffle?"
"It's you, I'm sure, cousin, who give our conversation its greatest elegance," Mrs. Midmore returned, "and I can't fancy what you mean by our high colour----!"
"Any more than I do"--Molly took the word straight from her--"by his calling us fierce, forsooth, or talking of himself as pale; when he has as fine a brown skin as one would wish to see if one likes brown men; which, however, I never dreamed I should, sir!" she wound up as boldly as ever. "I shouldn't have supposed we were fiercer than a country still containing so many blacks and savages," she as lightly remarked, "and, for our passions, I don't hesitate to say, need I, mother and brother? that I but live to control mine. What in life is our religion for," she inquired of Ralph with the same ready wit, "what is it for but just to teach us to do that?" He took her in afresh as she so put the case, but could pay her the frankest tribute and still return with a laugh: "Of course it's for that, and all I mean is that you strike me as kneeling to your Maker very much as you curtsey to your king--doing it too, to judge by the splendid service I attended at Plymouth after landing, among as many feathers and frills as ever would deck you out at court." There were moments when he so liked the way they listened to him as if his cleverness was beyond their custom that, this impression just now renewing itself, he could only go on. "Our feathers in America, you know, serve for the blacks, who bristle with them from head to foot like so many porcupines when they want to fight us; but," he broke off in friendly amusement at their reception of this, "there isn't a bravery you flaunt or a passion you succeed in smothering that I don't perfectly rejoice in and bless you for. I like you just as you are, and wouldn't have you or have anything a bit different," he sociably declared; "yes, yes, I'm more pleased with what I find you than ever I've been with anything in my life, and not least pleased with my cousin Perry," he resolutely pushed on; "even though he _will_ look as if he doesn't know what to make of me and wouldn't trust me a step nearer to him--or is it, still more than that, a step further than you can keep your eye on me, cousin?"