“I appreciate your interest in him,” she resumed smoothly, “but he is with you too much.  I do not know you.  I know nothing in the world about you.”

“Well—­” Again he hesitated as if over an impediment in his speech.  Then, finding with an effort the words he needed, he went on more easily:  “If there’s anything you’d like to know, I guess you can ask me.”

She frowned slightly, and leaving the door moved resolutely to the writing-table, where she stopped with her hand on the pile of newspapers.  Against the indeterminate colour of the walls her head, with its dark, silver-powdered hair, worn smooth and close after the Parisian fashion, showed as clear and fine as an etching.  In her blue summer gown she looked almost girlish in spite of the imperious dignity of her carriage; and from her delicate head to her slender feet, she diffused an air of fashion which perplexed and embarrassed him, though he was unaware of the conscious art which produced it.

“The only thing I’d like to know about you,” she answered, “is why you have taken so sudden a fancy to my son?”

At this he laughed outright, with a boyish zest which dispelled the oppressive formality of her manner.  He was completely at his ease again, and while he ran his hand impatiently through his hair, he answered frankly: 

“Well, you see, when it comes to that, I didn’t take any sudden fancy, as you call it—­I didn’t take any fancy at all—­it was the other way about.  The boy is a nice boy—­a bully good boy, anybody can see that—­and I like boys, that’s all.  When he began trotting round after me, we got to be chums in a way, but it would have been the same with any other boy who had come to the house—­especially,” he added with a clean blow given straight from the shoulder, “if he’d been a decent chap that a parcel of women were making into a muff.”

For a minute anger, righteous anger, kept her silent; then she responded with stateliness:  “I suppose I have a right to decide how my son shall be brought up?”

He met her stern gaze with a smile; and in the midst of her resentment she was distinctly aware of the impeccable honesty of his judgment.  The peculiar breeziness she had always thought of as “Western” sounded in his voice as he answered: 

“By George, I’m not so sure that you have!”

Before his earnestness she felt her anger melt slowly away.  The basic reasonableness of her character—­her passion to investigate experience, to examine facts, to search for truth—­this temperamental attitude survived the superficial wave of indignation which had swept over her.

“So you think I am making a mistake with Archibald?” she asked quietly; and growing tired of standing, she sank instinctively into one of the capacious leather-covered chairs by the table.  “But the question is—­are you able to judge?”

“Well, I’m a man, and I hate to see a boy coddled.  It’s going to be devilish hard on the kid when he grows up.”