“No, we can’t put it off,” assented he, hesitation in his voice, gloom upon his brow.  “Though,” he added, “you don’t look at all well.”  With an effort:  “Margaret, are you glad—­or sorry?”

“Glad,” she answered in a firm, resolute tone.  It became a little hard in its practicality as she added:  “You were quite right.  We took the only course.”

“You asked me to be a little patient with you,” he went on.

She trembled; her glance fluttered down.

“Well—­I—­I—­you’ll have to be a little patient with me, too.”  He was red with embarrassment.  She looked so still and cold and repelling that he could hardly muster voice to go on:  “You can’t but know, in a general sort of way, that I’m uncouth, unaccustomed to the sort of thing you’ve had all your life.  I’m going to do my best, Margaret.  And if you’ll help me, and be a little forbearing, I think—­I hope—­you’ll soon find I’m—­I’m—­oh, you understand.”

She had given a stealthy sigh of relief when she discovered that he was not making the protest she had feared.  “Yes, I understand,” replied she, her manner a gentle graciousness, which in some moods would have sent his pride flaring against the very heavens in angry scorn.  But he thought her most sweet and considerate, and she softened toward him with pity.  It was very, pleasant thus to be looked up to, and, being human, she felt anything but a lessened esteem for her qualities of delicateness and refinement, of patrician breeding, when she saw him thus on his knees before them.  He had invited her to look down on him, and she was accepting an invitation which it is not in human nature to decline.

There was one subject she had always avoided with him—­the subject of his family.  He had not exactly avoided it, indeed, had spoken occasionally of his brothers and sisters, their wives and husbands, their children.  But his reference to these humble persons, so far removed from the station to which he had ascended, had impressed her as being dragged in by the ears, as if he were forcing himself to pretend to himself and to her that he was not ashamed of them, when in reality he could not but be ashamed.  She felt that now was the time to bring up this subject and dispose of it.

Said she graciously:  “I’m sorry your father and mother aren’t living.  I’d like to have known them.”

He grew red.  He was seeing a tiny, unkempt cottage in the outskirts of Wayne, poor, even for that modest little town.  He was seeing a bent, gaunt old laborer in jeans, smoking a pipe on the doorsill; he was seeing, in the kitchen-dining-room-sitting-room-parlor, disclosed by the open door, a stout, aggressive-looking laborer’s wife in faded calico, doing the few thick china dishes in dented dishpan on rickety old table.  “Yes,” said he, with not a trace of sincerity in his ashamed, constrained voice, “I wish so, too.”

She understood; she felt sorry for him, proud of herself.  Was it not fine and noble of her thus to condescend?  “But there are your brothers and sisters,” she went graciously on.  “I must meet them some time.”  “Yes, some time,” said he, laboriously pumping a thin, watery pretense of enthusiasm into his voice.