Osborne felt rather disappointed she did not wind up with 'Damn it all, Georgie, old man, but this is infernally slow; let's go liquor-up and have a weed.' Nothing she could say or do now would surprise him. She was no longer an enigma or a mystery, but an ascertained certainty, a denounced deception. He said, simply and sadly,--
'You know, Miss Gordon, we Anglo-Saxons are a stupid race.'
'You will not find many in the _pure_ Anglo-Saxon blood.' Bowing slightly. 'Things are much altered when, through the matter-of-fact Anglo-Saxon veins, flows brighter and livelier blood.'
'I approve of the dull ways you have been finding fault with.'
'Ah, that is acquired stupidity, not natural. I did not say you are intelligent, but you are intellectual, intensely intellectual, and poetic. You always look at the glorified side of things. You are a poet.'
He stared at her. He forgot everything, and stared at her. When he recovered himself he replied nervously, hesitatingly, diffidently,--
'I-I assure you, Miss Gordon, I never wrote a line of poetry in my life--never even thought of such a thing.'
'It isn't necessary a poet should write poetry. He may think it.'
'But I assure you I have never even thought a line of poetry in my life.'
'Yes, you have. You thought poetry to-day at dinner, and were too shy to speak it.'
Again he forgot everything, and stared. A criminal caught red-handed could not have been more amazed with fear. He had never been accused of poetry before, and her words were like heartless revellers who broke into the sanctuary of his soul, tore from it his most sacred secret, and set it up in the marketplace to be jeered at by all the town.
She laughed softly. 'There is no witchery in it. I told you you were not intelligent, but you were intellectual. I am not intellectual, but I am intelligent. You are intellectual and a poet. I am intelligent, and I found you out.'
'As you people live here in England,' said Nevill, next morning at breakfast, 'this meal is the gloomiest, dinner is the solemnest, and supper is the sleepiest of the day. I can always understand a man being gloomy in the morning, but why people should be solemn at dinner and sleepy at supper I never could make out. The only way I can come near accounting for a man being solemn at dinner is because it is the most expensive meal of the day, and there is no way in the world so good for knocking the fun out of John Bull as to bleed him. But why people should look sleepy at supper licks me hollow!'