You can't teach her anything. You can't
imagine yourself telling her anything she doesn't know. The things we
think important don't reach her at all. They're not in her line, and
in everything else she knows more than we could ever guess at. But
that Miss Hope! It's a privilege to show her about. She wants to see
everything, and learn everything, and she goes poking her head into
openings and down shafts like a little fox terrier. And she'll sit
still and listen with her eyes wide open and tears in them, too, and
she doesn't know it--until you can't talk yourself for just looking at
her."

Clay rose and moved on to the house in silence. He was glad that
MacWilliams had interrupted him when he did. He wondered whether he
understood Alice Langham after all. He had seen many fine ladies
before during his brief visits to London, and Berlin, and Vienna, and
they had shown him favor. He had known other women not so fine.
Spanish-American senoritas through Central and South America, the wives
and daughters of English merchants exiled along the Pacific coast,
whose fair skin and yellow hair whitened and bleached under the hot
tropical suns. He had known many women, and he could have quoted

"Trials and troubles amany,
Have proved me;
One or two women, God bless them!
Have loved me."

But the woman he was to marry must have all the things he lacked.

She must fill out and complete him where he was wanting. This woman
possessed all of these things. She appealed to every ambition and to
every taste he cherished, and yet he knew that he had hesitated and
mistrusted her, when he should have declared himself eagerly and
vehemently, and forced her to listen with all the strength of his will.

Miss Langham dropped among the soft cushions of the launch with a sense
of having been rescued from herself and of delight in finding refuge
again in her own environment. The sight of King standing in the bow
beside Hope with his cigarette hanging from his lips, and peering with
half-closed eyes into the fading light, gave her a sense of restfulness
and content. She did not know what she wished from that other strange
young man. He was so bold, so handsome, and he looked at life and
spoke of it in such a fresh, unhackneyed spirit. He might make himself
anything he pleased. But here was a man who already had everything, or
who could get it as easily as he could increase the speed of the
launch,