“I suppose so.” He felt a mischievous desire to tell her how little the men he knew would probably like them _her_ way; but, in fact, the slow conviction was encroaching on his mind--not so much penetrating it as fluidically enwrapping it--that she was compounded of many graces. Her gestures, for example: they were all slow, and each showed off something, if only, for an instant, some lesser, some negligible contour. She had the air of not having stirred a limb or a feature for years, except to please, and of being now in the practice infallible. She was very feminine--no, hang it! that dairymaid word wouldn’t do. (Peter had been, in college, the proudest product of his several “theme-courses,” and the quest of the epithet was not unknown to him.) She was very simple and very sophisticated. He had to leave it at that. “I’ll tell you about our leaving America. You ought to have known long since. And yet--perhaps it was better your sympathies shouldn’t have been touched. If you thought we were brutes, that would leave you free, wouldn’t it?” “It did.” “Ah, yes--exactly!” She seemed to triumph for an instant. Then she looked out of the window again, and again spoke irrelevantly. “Are you in love?” Peter frowned. “No.” He was too young not to be stiff about it. “That’s rather a pity. I could have explained better.” “Oh, I know what it stands for.” She corrected him gently. “It ‘stands for’ nothing whatever. Either you’ve loved or you haven’t. It might have helped me--that’s all.” Then she seemed to brace herself for difficult exposition. “Listen, Peter. You must know this first. In the months just following your birth, everything changed. Your father developed tuberculosis--alarmingly, it was then supposed. That meant another climate. He owned property in Honolulu. It occurred to him to go there. In not taking you we acted on physicians’ advice. There was no telling what sort of life we might have to live. You were best off here. You were under expert care, and in those days we had news of you constantly. I am quite well aware”--her voice grew surer as she went on; she seemed less fantastically feminine, more simply human--“that many women would have chosen differently. For me there could be no question. You had been brought into the world in the belief that there would be no choice to make. We never dreamed, when you were born, of anything but the normal American life. I insist on your realizing that.” Peter bowed. It already began to change his vision of himself a little, though he wasn’t sure he liked his mystery to be merely tubercular. Though if that was all, why in the world--but he saw that he could only listen and wait. “Then--Honolulu didn’t serve very long. We had to go farther away from life. Now we’re in Tahiti. It’s--it’s a very wonderful climate.” Mrs. Wayne rose, drew the crimson curtain to one side, and looked out. It was a moment before she spoke, and as she spoke she sat down again with helpless grace.