I rose to my feet with battle in my eyes and then stopped perfectly
still and listened--unwillingly but compelled.
"Drink to me only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine," were the words that floated in at the window on the fragrant morning
sunbeams, in a voice of the most penetrating tenderness I had ever felt
break against my heartstrings.
"I--I--he sometimes demolishes a--a few weeds," father faltered, while
Dabney ducked his cotton-wool old head and slipped out of the door.
"You allow him to work in my--garden--and--" I faltered, just recovering
from the impact of the words of my favorite song of songs hurled at me
by the unseen enemy, when I was interrupted by his appearance in the
open door and we stood facing each other.
I am a woman who has very decided tastes about the biological man. I
know just how I want the creatures to look, and I haven't much interest
in one that isn't at least of the type of my preferred kind. Because I
am very tall and broad and deep-bosomed and vivid and high colored, and
have strong white teeth that crunch up about as much food in the
twenty-four hours as most field hands consume, and altogether I am very
much like one of the most vigorous of Sorolla's paintings, that is the
probable pathological reason I have always preferred an evolved Whistler
masculine nocturne that retreats to the limits of my comprehension and
then beckons me to follow. All other men I have grouped beyond the
border of my feminine nature and sought to waste no thought upon them.
It was a shock to come, suddenly, in my own breakfast room, face to face
with a type of man I had never before met. The enemy was astonishingly
large and lithe and distinctly resembled one of the big gold-colored
lions that live in the wilds of the Harpeth Mountains out beyond
Paradise Ridge. His head, with its tawny thatch that ought to have waved
majestically but which was sleek and decorous to the point of
worldliness, was poised on his neck and shoulders with a singularly
strong line that showed through a silk soft collar, held together by an
exquisitely worldly amethyst silk scarf which, it was a shock to see,
matched glints from eyes back under his heavy gold brows with what
appeared to be extreme sophistication. After the shock of the tie the
loose gray London worsted coat and trousers made only a passing
impression; and from my involuntary summary of the whole surprising man,
which had taken less than an instant, my dazed brain came back and was
held and concentrated by the beauty of the smile that flooded out over
me in welcome after my father's hurried introduction.
"The Reverend Mr. Gregory Goodloe--my daughter Charlotte," father
announced, as he rose and waved in my direction a hand that was cordial
to the point of bravado.