"Well, the broomsedge is becoming to you. It seems your natural background somehow. Now it makes George Bolingbroke look frivolous." "His natural background is the ballroom, and I'm not sure he hasn't the best of it. I can't live always in the broomsedge." "Oh, it isn't only the broomsedge, though that goes admirably with your hair--it's the bigness, the space, the simplicity. You take up too much room among lamps and palms, you trip on a waxed floor, and down goes poor Bessy. But out here you are natural and at home. The sky sets off your head--and it's really very fine if you only knew it. Out here, with me, you are in your native element." "Is that because you are my native element? Can you imagine poor Bessy fitting into the picture?" "To tell the truth I can't imagine poor Bessy fitting you at all. Her native element is pink tarlatan." "And yours?" I demanded. "That you must find out for yourself." A smile played on her face like an edge of light. "The sunrise," I answered. "Like you, I am sorry that I can't be always in my proper setting," she replied. "You are always. The sunrise never leaves you." Her brows arched merrily, and I saw the tiny scar I had remembered from childhood catch up the corner of her mouth with its provoking and irresistible trick of expression. "Do you mean to tell me that you learned these gallantries in Johnson's Dictionary?" she enquired, "or have you taken other lessons from the General besides those in speculations?" I had got out of my starched shirt and my evening clothes, and the timidity of the ballroom had no part in me under the open sky. "Johnson's Dictionary wasn't my only teacher," I retorted, "nor was the General. At ten years of age I could recite the prosiest speeches of Sir Charles Grandison." "Ah, that explains it. Well, I'm glad anyway you didn't learn it from the General. He broke poor Aunt Matoaca's heart, you know." "Then I hope he managed to break his own at the same time."