He laughed out his desire to know what could be really finer than the flower he had culled, and was ready to prove to her that he had other flowers too by presenting her at her convenience the entire nosegay. The spirit of this contention on both sides would have continued, no doubt, to raise the pitch of pleasure hadn't Perry, turning round from his window as if to stare at a pair of comedians in a play, intervened in a manner that spoke again of the notable growth of his wit.
"As I think you've never in your life written to me in any absence," he said to his sister, "of course I can't answer for your way with it, especially as one has heard that love-letters are always distracted, and I wouldn't give a rap myself for one that wasn't"--of which last he rather solemnly notified Ralph. "My sister Nan," he further informed him, "isn't a girl to lose her head even when she loses her heart; there's never a word out in anything _she_ writes, and whenever I'm away from her she does me the kindness."
"Pray how can _you_ judge of her style," Molly asked in derision, "when you told me but the other day you'd bring me a specimen of your own to look over and then didn't?--which I think must have been because on your intending the first letter of your life you found the feat was beyond you. It was to have been to a lady, didn't I understand?--and you'll have lost your head, I suppose, even more than your heart, and were afraid of showing for more distracted than need have been."
Perry Midmore, under this retort, only looked at the girl as if her humour, keen though it might have been, already found his thought, drawn off; so that, unexpectedly to Ralph, his defence was but after an instant to ignore her and make, as with a decenter interest, an appeal to their guest. "I should like to show _you_, sir, how Nan can acquit herself, though I'm sure of course that you understand our exchange of compliments. We bandy words in sport and among ourselves, but don't take 'em, you may well suppose, from any one else. I quite agree with my mother," he further remarked, "that we're bound to take you for a man of the greatest taste."
Ralph had already noted in him that his eyes, which seemed to wish for some restless reason to keep clear of those of his announced brother-in-law, might at the same time have been resisting with difficulty some possibly better cause for not appearing to avoid them. He almost caught himself in the act of wondering after another moment whether this member of the family were not appointed to interest him more by a round-about course than the others by the directness which matched his own and which would perhaps give his own, after all, comparatively little to do. That flight of fancy couldn't but spring from the inference, now lively, that Perry was now practising the art of the straight look very much as he might have practised that of balancing his stick on his chin. Again with this, however, the difficulty recurred: wanting himself, and wanting much, to encourage the freedom, he yet troubled it by the look returned as a sign of that. Should he have, he asked himself, to shut his eyes so that his cousin might keep _his_ open upon him? "Take me in, take me in, and see how little it will hurt you," he felt he should have liked to say; but what came back was that just the intention of it defeated somehow as by excess of meaning the act of reassurance. What the devil could have been at stake, he seemed to see the poor man wonder, when one of the scales, to drop enough, demanded such a weight as that? All the while, none the less, Perry's success in facing him did go on. The great thing, Ralph therefore judged, was for them to miss no breath of real communication that either might feel he could draw. If either wanted practice here it was, and by way of proving this wouldn't he himself, our friend reflected, do just the right thing in playing a little with that question of the family tone? "Yes," he smiled at his kinsman, though signifying that he made the point scarce less for the ladies too, "yes, your way with each other is the pleasantest possible; but all the same, you know, I somehow feel mixed with it the presence of stronger passions and--what shall I impute to you?--fiercer characters than I've been used to in my rather heavy and puritanical part of the world."