"You’re to be thanked, too," she laughed—"or ought to be. But you don’t like it, I know, so I tell your wife how very pleasant you are making Adriutha for my sister and myself." "Do you find it pleasant?" "Yes, I do." "Like the people?" They had halted on the stairs. She looked up at him. "Some of them I like," she said frankly. "Which?" "That is bad manners! ... But I like you and your wife and Christine and Jack." "All of us?" "Unreservedly—except in your case." "What’s the matter with me?" he asked grimly. "Why, I don’t know you very well," she said, "so how can——" "Come and talk it over," he said. They resumed the descent of the stairway together, and, side by side, walked out to a seat on the terrace overlooking the river. "Sit down, ma’am," he said, dusting the marble bench with his drab-colored soft hat. She seated herself with decorum, inwardly amused. He dusted a place for himself, and sat down beside her. "Now," he said, "what’s the matter with me, Miss Tennant?" She laughed deliciously. "Nothing that I have ever discovered." "You’re not much of an explorer, are you?" "A rather good one, Mr. Rivett. But—you know there are still certain peaks in the world that defy approach," she added audaciously. "I’m a peak, am I?" He came so near to smiling that the girl watched him with increasing interest. "You know," she said, "that you _are_ not exactly talkative, Mr. Rivett. How is a girl to form any definite idea of a—a—sphinx?" "That’s two names you’ve called me already"—he looked at his watch—"in the last four minutes—a peak and a sphinx." She was laughing so unrestrainedly now that the corners of his eyes began to wrinkle a trifle. He said: "What do you think of a self-made man who was once schoolmaster, day laborer, donkey-engine tender, foreman—all kinds of things, and whose wife was washing out a wood shed when he first met her?" "Is that you?" "It is. What do you think of such a man’s chances in New York?" "Financial?" "Social." "I don’t know New York." "You’re highly connected there?" "It is a very distant connection.... Mr. Edgerton chooses to acknowledge it." "He’s a snob, isn’t he?" "Not in the slightest," she said pleasantly; but the blood mounted to her cheeks and betrayed her. "You like him?" "Naturally." "Unnaturally, too?" "Kinship has little to do with my liking him." "He’s rather easy-going, isn’t he?" She flushed up again, and turned her clear eyes on his little brown ones. "Don’t you like him?" she asked. "Isn’t he easy-going?" "He has not yet found himself. He is an intelligent, warm-hearted, high-minded man, capable of taking an honorable position in the world.... And I do not doubt that he will one day take and keep it." "He was in iron, was he not—Edgerton, Tennant & Co.?" "Yes." Mr. Rivett thought for a while. "By the way," he said, "I neglected to answer your question. I’ll answer it now. I like Mr. Edgerton."