Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/277

THE BIRTHPLACE "Preposterous?"—he made her stare with this as he had not yet done.

At sight of her look, however—the gleam, as it might have been, of a queer suspicion—he bent to her kindly and tapped her cheek. "Oh, it's all right. We must fall back on the Putchins. Do you remember what she said?—'They've made it so pretty now.' They have made it pretty, and it's a first-rate show. It's a first-rate show and a first-rate billet, and He was a first-rate poet, and you're a first-rate woman—to put up so sweetly, I mean, with my nonsense."

She appreciated his domestic charm and she justified that part of his tribute which concerned herself. "I don't care how much of your nonsense you talk to me, so long as you keep it all for me and don't treat Them to it."

"The pilgrims? No," he conceded—"it isn't fair to Them. They mean well."

"What complaint have we, after all, to make of Them so long as They don't break off bits—as They used, Miss Putchin told us, so awfully—to conceal about Their Persons? She broke them at least of that."

"Yes," Gedge mused again; "I wish awfully she hadn't!"

"You would like the relics destroyed, removed? That's all that's wanted!"

"There are no relics."

"There won't be any soon, unless you take care." But he was already laughing, and the talk was not dropped without his having patted her once more. An impression or two, however, remained with her from it, as he saw from a question she asked him on the morrow. "What did you mean yesterday about Miss Putchin's simplicity—its keeping her 'straight'? Do you mean mentally?"

Her "mentally" was rather portentous, but he practically confessed. "Well, it kept her up. I mean," he amended, laughing, "it kept her down." 265