Actresses -- Fiction; Americans -- England -- Fiction; Love stories; Mate selection -- Fiction
The two were walking side by side across the rich velvet of the
immemorial English turf. The extreme softness of the autumn day, its
shifting lights, its mellow envelope, the beauty of the park—the age,
the stability, the harmony, served to touch the young fellow’s spirits.
At any rate there was a ring in him, an equilibrium that surprised
Galorey.
“‘Most things,’ dad said to me, ‘go back to the earth.’” He struck the
English turf with his stick. “Dad said a fellow had better buy those
things that stay above the ground.” Dan smiled frankly at his companion.
“Curious thing to say, wasn’t it?” he reflected. “I remembered it, and I
got to wondering after I saw him buried, ‘_what are_ the things that
stay above the ground?’ The old man never gave me another talk like
that.”
After a few seconds Galorey put in:
“But, my dear chap, you did give me a shock up there just now when you
said you were going to spend ‘all your money on some girl.’”
The millionaire took a chestnut from his pocket. He held it high above
his head and the little dog that had been yelping at his heels fixed his
eyes on it. Blair poised it, then threw it as far as he could. It sped
through the air and the terrier ran like mad across the park.
“I like girls awfully, Gordon, and when I find the right one, why, then
I’m going to feel what a bully thing it is to be rich.”
Lord Galorey groaned aloud.
“My dear chap!” he exclaimed.
The spell of the day, the fragrant beauty of the time and place and hour
were clearly upon Dan Blair. Lord Galorey was sympathetic to him. The
terrier came tearing back with the chestnut held between his thick jaws.
Dan bent down to take the nut from the dog and wrestled with him gently.
“Swell little grip he’s got. Nice old pup! Let it go now!” And he threw
the nut far again, and as the terrier ran once more Blair thrust his
hands down in his pockets and began softly to whistle the tune of
_Mandalay_.
He said slowly, going back to his subject: “It must be great to feel
that a fellow can give her jewels like the Duchess of Breakwater’s,
ropes of ’em”—he nodded toward the house—“and a fine old place like this
now, and motors and yachts and all kinds of stuff.”
His eyes rested on the suave lines of the Elizabethan house, with its
softened gables and its banked terraces. Possibly his vivid imagination
pictured “some nice girl” there waiting, as they should come up, to meet
him.
“I have always thought it would be bully to find a poor girl—pretty as a
peach, of course—one who had never had much, and just cover her with
things. Hey, there!” he cried to the terrier, who had come running back,
“bring it to me.”
They had come up to the terrace by this, and Dan’s confidence, fresh as
a gush of water from a rock, had ceased. His face was placid. He didn’t
realize what he had said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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