Mount Dunstan took him up.  He was sick of hearing the fellow’s voice.

“There will be a good many things,” he said; “there will be great personages and small ones, pomps and vanities, glittering things and heavy ones.”

“When she sees what she wants,” said Anstruthers, “she will hold out her hand, knowing it will come to her.  The things which drown will not disturb her.  I once made the blunder of suggesting that she might need protection against the importunate—­as if she had been an English girl.  It was an idiotic thing to do.”

“Because?” Mount Dunstan for the moment had lost his head.  Anstruthers had maddeningly paused.

“She answered that if it became necessary she might perhaps be able to protect herself.  She was as cool and frank as a boy.  No air pince about it—­merely consciousness of being able to put things in their right places.  Made a mere male relative feel like a fool.”

“When are things in their right places?” To his credit be it spoken, Mount Dunstan managed to say it as if in the mere putting together of idle words.  What man likes to be reminded of his right place!  No man wants to be put in his right place.  There is always another place which seems more desirable.

“She knows—­if we others do not.  I suppose my right place is at Stornham, conducting myself as the brother-in-law of a fair American should.  I suppose yours is here—­shut up among your closed corridors and locked doors.  There must be a lot of them in a house like this.  Don’t you sometimes feel it too large for you?”

“Always,” answered Mount Dunstan.

The fact that he added nothing else and met a rapid side glance with unmoving red-brown eyes gazing out from under rugged brows, perhaps irritated Anstruthers.  He had been rather enjoying himself, but he had not enjoyed himself enough.  There was no denying that his plaything had not openly flinched.  Plainly he was not good at flinching.  Anstruthers wondered how far a man might go.  He tried again.

“She likes the place, though she has a natural disdain for its condition.  That is practical American.  Things which are going to pieces because money is not spent upon them—­mere money, of which all the people who count for anything have so much—­are inevitably rather disdained.  They are ‘out of it.’  But she likes the estate.”  As he watched Mount Dunstan he felt sure he had got it at last—­the right thing.  “If you were a duke with fifty thousand a year,” with a distinctly nasty, amicably humorous, faint laugh, “she would—­by the Lord, I believe, she would take it over—­and you with it.”

Mount Dunstan got up.  In his rough walking tweeds he looked over-big—­and heavy—­and perilous.  For two seconds Nigel Anstruthers would not have been surprised if he had without warning slapped his face, or knocked him over, or whirled him out of his chair and kicked him.  He would not have liked it, but—­for two seconds—­it would have been no surprise.  In fact, he instinctively braced his not too firm muscles.  But nothing of the sort occurred.  During the two seconds—­perhaps three—­Mount Dunstan stood still and looked down at him.  The brief space at an end, he walked over to the hearth and stood with his back to the big fireplace.