“That’s what I meant by moving the world,” T. Tembarom went on. “You know she’s _right_, and you’ve got to do what she says, if you love her.”
“And you always do,” said the duke--“always and forever. There are very few. They are the elect.”
“I said to her once that there wasn’t more than one of her in the world because there couldn’t be enough to make two of that kind. I wasn’t joshing either; I meant it. It’s her quiet little voice and her quiet, babyfied eyes that get you where you can’t move. And it’s something else you don’t know anything about. It’s her never doing anything for herself, but just doing it because it’s the right thing for you.”
The duke’s chin had sunk a little on his breast, and looking back across the hundred years, he forgot for a moment where he was.
“What did you say?” asked T. Tembarom. The duke came back.
“I was thinking of the time when I was nine and twenty,” he answered. “It was not yesterday nor even the day before. The one I knew died when she was twenty-four.”
“Died!” said Tembarom. “Good Lord!” He dropped his head and even changed color. “A fellow can’t get on to a thing like that. It seems as if it couldn’t happen. Suppose--” he caught his breath hard and then pulled himself up--“Nothing could happen to her before she knew that I’ve proved what I said--just proved it, and done every single thing she told me to do!”
“It’s because of that I began to say this.” Tembarom spoke hurriedly that he might thrust away the sudden dark thought. “You’re a man, and I’m a man; far away ahead of me as you are, you’re a man, too. I was crazy to get her to marry me and come here with me, and she wouldn’t.”
“She laid ’em out as if she’d been my mother instead of a little red-headed angel. She didn’t waste a word,--just told me what I was up against. She’d lived in the village with her grandmother, and she knew. She said I’d got to come and find out for myself what no one else could teach me. She told me about the kind of girls I’d see--beauties that were different from anything I’d ever seen before. And it was up to me to see all of them--the best of them.”
“Yes. With titles like those in novels, she said, and clothes like the ‘Woman’s Pictorial.’ The kind of girls, she said, that would make her look like a housemaid. Housemaid be darned!” he exclaimed, suddenly growing hot. “I’ve seen the whole lot of them, I’ve done my darndest to get next, and there’s not one--” he stopped short. “Why should any of them look at me, anyhow?” he added suddenly.
