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."