“He’s terribly distressed about it,” Rush went on.  In his embarrassment he wasn’t looking at her and she composed her face.  “He didn’t mean to shock you or—­or offend you.  He says he gave you reason enough to be offended, but only because you didn’t understand.  He says he has always—­cared for you a lot.  He said he thought you were the most—­well, about the most perfect thing in the world.  Only to-night he said he got carried off his feet and went further than he had any right to.  And he simply can’t bear to have you think that he meant anything—­disrespectful.  He felt he had to apologize to you before he went home, but you didn’t come down so finally he told me about it and made me promise that I’d tell you to-night.  Of course, I don’t know what he did,” Rush concluded, “but I can tell you this.  Graham Stannard’s a white man; they don’t make them whiter than that.”

Her reply, although it was unequivocally to the effect that it was all right—­Graham needn’t worry—­failed, altogether, to reassure him.  Was this, after all, he wondered, what she had exploded about?  She prevented further inquiry, however, by an abrupt change of the subject, demanding to be told what it was that he and his father, all these hours, had been talking about.

He took up the topic with unforced enthusiasm.  He had been surprised and deeply touched over the discovery that his father did not require to be argued out of the project either to send him back to Harvard or to start him in at the bottom in Martin Whitney’s bank.  “If he’d just been through it all himself, he couldn’t have understood any better how I feel about it.”

“Did you tell him about the farm?” Mary asked.

This was an idea of Graham’s which she and Rush had been developing with him during the half hour in the drawing-room before they had gone down to dinner.  Young Stannard, during his two years on a destroyer, had conceived an extraordinary longing for Mother Earth, and had filled in his dream in tolerably complete detail.  What he wanted was an out-of-door life which should not altogether deprive him of the pleasures of an urban existence; and he accomplished this paradox by premising a farm within convenient motoring distance of Chicago, on one of the hard roads.  Somewhere in the dairy belt, out Elgin way perhaps.  You could have wonderful week-end house parties in a place like that, even in winter, with skiing and skating for amusements, and in summer it would be simply gorgeous.  And, of course, one could always run into town for the night if there was anything particular to come for.

Mary had volunteered to keep house for them and they had talked a lot of amusing nonsense as to what her duties should be.  Graham, too, had a kid sister, only seventeen, who fitted admirably into the picture.  She loved the country, simply lived in riding breeches and rode like a man—­a sight better than most men—­and drove a car like a young devil.  There was nothing, in fact, she couldn’t do.