British -- United States -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Married women -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
Everybody was ready for breakfast, and we had rather a squash to get
seated, and had to be very near. Mr. Renour was next me, and he is
simply delightful in a party; and the friend, Octavia says, is exactly
her affair, as she is past thirty, and he is a charming boy of
twenty-two.
There is a nigger cook and he makes such lovely corn cakes and rolls and
agreeable breakfast dishes, and we were all so hungry.
Mr. Renour had been down to this other place on business, and there
waited to board us sooner.
The country seemed to grow more desolate and grim as we went on. After
breakfast we sat outside in the observation car together, and he told me
all about it, and the way they prospect to find the ore. And everything
one hears makes one respect their pluck and endurance more. He asked
me to call him Nelson; he said Mr. Renour was so "kinder stiff" and he
wasn't used to it, so I did, but the good taste which characterizes
everything about him made him never suggest he should be familiar with
me. He was just as gentle and dear as anyone could be, and seemed to be
trying to efface the remembrance in my mind that he had ever rather made
love to me.
Life had always been so kind to him, he said, even though from a child
he had always had to work so hard. He said the Senator was the biggest
man he had ever seen (meaning by that the biggest soul), and it was
owing to his help and encouragement and splendid advice, that he had
been able to stand out against the other sharks who wanted to get the
shares of his mine when at one moment he was a "bit shaky"; and now all
was well, and he would soon be many times a millionaire. Then I asked
him what he would do with it, and he said, "I'll just make those nearest
to me happy and then those further off; and then I'll set my brains to
devise some scheme to benefit my country; and p'r'aps you'd help me,"
he said. "You great ladies in England think so much of the poor and
suffering. I don't want just to put my name on big charities; p'r'aps
you'd suggest something which could be of value?"
His whole face is so fine and open, Mamma, and his lithe, sinewy figure
reminds me of the Ludovici Mars; not quite so slender as Harry and Tom,
but just as strong, and those balanced lines of rugged strength are
quite as beautiful. I wonder what one of the meaty Easterners would look
beside him, if they could both have nothing on and be made in bronze!
"I think I'd like to marry an English girl," he said at last. "Our women
are very beautiful and very smart, but yours have a tenderness which
appeals to me. I could do with a mighty lot of love when once I took one
for my own." Then he said he had always kept his ideal of a woman, and
when he found her she should have him, "body and heart and soul." And
think, Mamma, what a fortunate woman she would be, wouldn't she?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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