The young man shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. "Am I a type,
Woman-in-the-Woods?" he asked.
"Indeed, you are absolutely different from anybody else." And then,
terrified, I turned red.
"Oh, I know! You didn't mean it either as a brick-bat or a bouquet,
merely the truth as you see it. You are transparently truthful,
fundamentally truthful, and at the same time the American business
woman! You can't understand how that intrigues me!"
And then, quite simply and boyishly, he began to talk about
himself. I got glimpses of a boyhood spent partly in a stately home
in Vienna, and partly roaming about the great Hungarian estate which
his mother loved, and to which the two returned summer after summer,
until her death. Then student days, and after that, foot-loose
wanderings up and down the earth and across the seven seas.
His grandmother had dropped courtesies to kings; and mine had
dropped "aitches." His father had been a European celebrity, mine a
ship-chandler in Boston, U.S.A. Yet here we two were; and he might
have been a high-spirited and most beautiful little boy picnicking
with a sedate and old-maidish little girl.
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