"We'd got the room part in order by then, and Insley sat down and looked around him, enjoyable. It was a beautiful room. I always think that that library ain't no amateur at its regular business of being a vital part of the home. Some rooms are awful amateurs at it, and some ain't no more than apprentices, and some are downright enemies to the house they're in. But that library I always like to look around. It seems to me, if I really knew about such things, and how they ought to be, I couldn't like that room any better. Colour, proportion, window, shadow--they was all lined up in a kind of an enjoyable professionalism of doing their best. The room was awake now, too--I had the windows open and I'd started the clock. Insley set looking around as if there was sighs inside him. I knew how, down in New England, his father's home sort of behaved itself like this home. But after college, he had had to choose his way, and he had faced about to the new west, the new world, where big ways of living seemed to him to be sweeping as a wind sweeps. He had chose as he had chose, and I suppose he was glad of that; but I knew the room he had when he was in town, at Threat Hubbelthwait's hotel, must be a good deal like being homesick, and that this library was like coming home. "'Mr. Proudfit had just returned and would be down at once,' the man come back and told him. And while he waited Insley says to me: "'Have you seen anything of the little boy to-day, Miss Marsh?' "I was dying to answer back: 'Yes, I see Miss Sidney early this morning,' but you can't answer back all you die to. So I told him yes, I'd seen all three of them and they was to be up in the city all day to buy some things for Christopher. Mis' Emmons and Robin was both to come up to Proudfit House to Alex's house party--seems they'd met abroad somewheres a year or more back; and they was going to bring Christopher, who Mis' Emmons didn't show any sign of giving up while her plan, whatever it was, was getting itself thought over. So they'd whisked the child off to the city that day to get him the things he needed. And there wasn't time to say anything more, for in come Alex Proudfit. "He was in his riding clothes--horseback dress we always call it in the village, which I s'pose isn't city talk, proper. He was long and thin and brown, and sort of slow-moving in his motions, but quick and nervous in his talk; and I don't know what there was about him--his clothes, or his odd, old-country looking ring, or the high white thing wound twice around his neck, or his way of pronouncing his words--but he seemed a good deal like a picture of a title or a noted man. The minute you looked at him, you turned proud of being with him, and you pretty near felt distinguished yourself, in a nice way, because you was in his company. Alex was like that.