Rodney Temple, making his arrangements for leaving for the day, met one question with another.  “What do you?”

“You know him,” Ashley urged, “and I don’t.”

“I thought you did.  I thought you’d read him right off—­as a cow-puncher.”

“He looks like one, by Jove! and he speaks like one, too.  You wouldn’t call him a gentleman?  What?”

“If you mean by a gentleman one who’s always been able to take the best in the world for granted, perhaps he isn’t.  But that isn’t our test—­over here.”

“Then, what is?”

“I’m not sure that I could tell you so that you’d understand—­at any rate, not unless you start out with the fact that the English gentleman and the American differ not only in species, but in genus.  I’d go so far as to say that they’ve got to be recognized by different sets of faculties.  You get at your man by the eye and the ear; we have to use a subtler apparatus.  If we didn’t we should let a good many go uncounted.  Some of our finest are even more uncouth with their consonants than good friend Davenant.  They’d drop right out of your list, but they take a high place in ours.  To try to discern one by the methods created for the other is like what George Eliot says of putting on spectacles to detect odors.  Ignorance of this basic social fact on both sides has given rise to much international misjudgment.  See?”

“Can’t say that I do.”

“No, you wouldn’t.  But until you do you won’t understand a big simple type—­”

“I don’t care a hang about his big simple type.  What I want to know is how to take him.  Is he a confounded sentimentalist?—­or is he still putting up a bluff?”

“What difference does it make to you?”

“If he’s putting up a bluff, he’s waiting out there at Michigan for me to call it.  If he’s working the sentimental racket, then I’ve got to be the beneficiary of his beastly good-will.”

“If he’s putting up a bluff, you can fix him by not calling it at all; and as for his beastly good-will, well, he’s a beneficiary of it, too.”

“How so?”

“Because beastly good-will is a thing that cuts both ways.  He’ll get as much out of it as you.”

“That’s all very fine—­”

“It’s very fine, indeed, for him.  We’ve an old saying in these parts:  By the Street called Straight we come to the House called Beautiful.  It’s one of those fanciful saws of which the only justification is that it works.  Any one can test the truth of it by taking the highway.  Well, friend Davenant is taking it.  He’ll reach the House called Beautiful as straight as a die.  Don’t you fret about that.  You’ll owe him nothing in the long run, because he’ll get all the reward he’s entitled to.  When’s the wedding?  Fixed the date yet?”

“Not going to fix one,” Ashley explained, moodily.  “One of these days, when everything is settled at Tory Hill and the sale is over, we shall walk off to the church and get married.  That seems to be the best way, as matters stand.”