Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/139

 through our young man's blood and sought expression, without the least difficulty, in an attitude about it to his young hostess as competent as if he had by some extraordinary turn become able to inform her ignorance.

"My grandfather—yes," he said, "must of course, thirty years ago have been rather a wild sort of character and anything but a credit to us. But he was terribly handsome, you know," Ralph smiled, "and if your great-aunt, while we hung on here, had cause to complain of his fickleness, I think we're all now aware that she fell quite madly in love with him and paid him attentions of an extravagance that he couldn't after all ignore—not in common civility." He liked to go back to that—since it was all indeed, under growing freedom of reference, so much more behind him than before; it was truly brave matter for talk, warming his blood, as we say, while it flowed; and he had at the end of another minute so mastered it that he would have liked to catch her mistaken in order to put her right. Her face, for that matter, glowed with the pleasure, wasn't it? of his assurance thus made positive; assurances, roundabout them, couldn't, she showed, too much multiply, and it wasn't to be till considerably after that the sense of this moment marked her for him as really rather listening, though in all delight, to his recital of a learnt lesson, than as herself taking from him an 125