City and town life -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
not know; London he was barely aware of; social functions it would be an
impertinence to bring in; games he did not play; sport he had scarcely
heard of. You were confined to America, and if you knew next to nothing
of American life, there you were.
Tembarom saw it all,--he was sharp enough for that,--and his habit
of being jocular and wholly unashamed saved him from the misery of
awkwardness that Willocks would have been sure to have writhed under.
His casual frankness, however, for a moment embarrassed Lady Edith to
the bitterest extremity. When you are trying your utmost to make a queer
person oblivious to the fact that his world is one unknown to you, it is
difficult to know where do you stand when he says.
“It's mighty hard to talk to a man who doesn't know a thing that belongs
to the kind of world you've spent your life in, ain't it? But don't you
mind me a minute. I'm glad to be talked to anyhow by people like you.
When I don't catch on, I'll just ask. No man was ever electrocuted for
not knowing, and that's just where I am. I don't know, and I'm glad to
be told. Now, there's one thing. Burrill said 'Your Ladyship' to you, I
heard him. Ought I to say it, er oughtn't I?”
“Oh, no,” she answered, but somehow without distaste in the momentary
stare he had startled her into; “Burrill is--”
“He's a servant,” he aided encouragingly. “Well, I've never been a
butler, but I've been somebody's servant all my life, and mighty glad of
the chance. This is the first time I've been out of a job.”
What nice teeth he had! What a queer, candid, unresentful creature! What
a good sort of smile! And how odd that it was he who was putting her
more at her ease by the mere way in which he was saying this almost
alarming thing! By the time he had ended, it was not alarming at all,
and she had caught her breath again.
She was actually sorry when the door opened and Lady Joan Fayre came in,
followed almost immediately by Lady Mallowe and Captain Palliser, who
appeared to have just returned from a walk and heard the news.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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