"Oh I don't care how old he is----"
"So long as he's young!" Poor Pendrel--for want of anything better to
do--interrupted.
But she held her course. "The older he is the more he'll have given us
time to see. Of course," she splendidly added, "he may be a failure,
and, if he is, that will more or less settle the question. We're nowhere
till it _is_ settled."
Ralph showed on his side no less noble a patience. "But isn't it settled
by the cowboy?"
"The cowboy?" she stared.
"Why isn't he what you want, and why isn't he good enough? He sometimes
in spite of his calling, I believe, lives to a great age. There are
cases surely in which he will have given you time to see, and he has the
great merit of standing there ready to your hand. You talk about the
'question,' but what is he but the best answer to it that any conditions
at all conceivable can yield? You say mine--my conditions--are wrong; so
that what are his, logically, unless right? If he isn't right _with_
them it would seem therefore their fault. I wonder it doesn't strike you
in fine that if he isn't good enough your idea itself perhaps isn't."
Now that Ralph was launched he felt the tide high. "That's what it comes
to, your idea, dress it up as you will. You want a fellow only who shall
have had adventures--and that, I hasten to grant, is any lady's right.
There's no disputing about tastes, but that isn't true about principles.
You want the adventure to have been, or necessarily to be, of the
species most marked and determined by our climate, our geographical
position, our political institutions, our social circumstances and our
national character. It seems to me you see lines drawn remarkably sharp,
but, allowing you that, I repeat that you strike me as having but to
take your choice. The cow-boy," he suggested, "of middle-age, say----"
But she had now interrupted--as if for commiseration. "I don't even yet
know what a cowboy is!"
It was at all events her seeing him gracelessly astray that she made him
most feel. "There am _I_ for you then. I don't know what anyone is who
leads the life of action--so little am I such a creature myself." And
straight--though he was sore for it--he looked the whole thing in the
face. "It's my type itself that's impossible to you. I shouldn't even
here," he averred, "be able to meet your views or do what you require.
I'd be a brute for it if I could--as indeed I often wish I _were_ one;
but I'll be hanged if I see my way. My adventures are all in a very
small circle"--and our young man tapped the seat of his brain. He
thought it out at the moment almost as much for himself as for Aurora.
"If it weren't that I'm trying to equip myself without disgrace in
_this_ one, I should doubt if in a fix of the kind that for you makes
the hero I could be rightly counted on to know what to do. There you
have me. Yes, it comes home to me: I only know what to do in thought or,
as you might say, imagination--and but the least little bit even there;
also without any firm confidence of doing it. So that if none but a
ranchman need apply----!" he could in fine, while they dropped, with
this, into their longest break, but look about for his hat. "I suppose
it's no use my saying," he went on when he had found this article, "that
if it interests you at all I may just possibly before long come in for
something in England." He waited a little for her to take him up on it,
but to the simple increase of his sense of her leaving him now to
flounder as he would. He floundered accordingly an instant longer. "To
me--to my mind of course I mean--such a windfall, in the shape of a bit
of old property, an old house, a piece of suggestive concrete antiquity,
easily represents, as you can conceive, rather a 'treat.' But I don't
dream it's a thing to dazzle you with." He felt as soon as he had
spoken, or rather as soon as her own silence had again marked itself, as
if he had seen a vulgar bribe fall flat; and he was equally aware that
what he next said deepened this appearance. "Of course there's nothing
of that sort that can mean much to you to-day. You've seen everything
again and again."
"Oh," she answered at last, "I've seen a great deal. But not what you
will. You'll know so much better how. You've work cut out, but you're to
be envied."