“I’ve never seen an Australian cottage looking like this, now. And yet it isn’t the number of things you’ve put into it.” “The number I’ve taken out,” laughed Harriet. William James sat there with his quiet, slumberous-seeming body, watching her: watching the quick radiance of her fair face, and the charm of her bearing. There was something quick and sure and, as it were, beyond the ordinary clay, about her, that exercised a spell over him. She was his real Cornish idea of a lady: simple, living among people as if one of themselves, and yet not one of themselves: a sort of magic about her. He could almost see a glow in the air around her. And he could see that for her he was just a nice fellow who lived in another world and on another plane than herself, and that he could never come up or she come down. She was the queen that slumbers somewhere in every Cornish imagination, the queen ungrudged. And perhaps, in the true Celtic imagination slumbers the glamorous king as well. The Celt needs the mystic glow of real kingliness. Hence his loneliness in the democratic world of industry, and his social perversity. “I don’t suppose Rose could ever learn to do this with a room, could she now?” he asked, making a slight gesture with his hand. He sat with his clear, queer, light grey eyes fixed on Harriet’s face. “I think so,” cried Harriet; then she met the watchful eyes. “In her own way she could. Every woman has her own way, you know.” “Yes, I do know,” he answered. “And you see,” said Harriet, “we’re more or less lazy people who have no regular work in the world. If we had, perhaps we should live in a different way.” William James shook his head. “It’s what’s bred into you,” he said, “that comes out. Now if I was a really rich man, I think I could learn to carry it off with the best of them, out here. But when it comes to being the real thing, why, I know it would be beyond me, so there you are.” “But can one be sure?” she cried. “I think I can. I can see the difference between common and uncommon. I can do more than that. I can see the difference between gentlemen who haven’t got the gift, and those that have. Take Lord Washburn, for example. He’s a gentleman all right--he comes of an old family, they tell me. But I doubt very much if he’s any better than I am.” “Why should he be?” cried Harriet. “What I mean is,” said William James, “he hasn’t got the gift, you know.” “The gift of what?” said Harriet, puzzled. “How shall I put it? The gift that you’ve got, now: and that Mr Somers has as well: and that people out here don’t have.” “But that may only be manner,” said Harriet.