The governor’s room being deserted except by himself and Mr. Lansing, he continued the animated explanation of his delay in arriving.

“So I stayed,” he said to Boots with an enthusiasm quite boyish, “and I had a perfectly bully time.  She’s just as clever as she can be—­startling at moments.  I never half appreciated her—­she formerly appealed to me in a different way—­a young girl knocking at the door of the world, and no mother or father to open for her and show her the gimcracks and the freaks and the side-shows.  Do you know, Boots, that some day that girl is going to marry somebody, and it worries me, knowing men as I do—­unless you should think of—­”

“Great James!” faltered Mr. Lansing, “are you turning into a schatschen?  Are you planning to waddle through the world making matches for your friends?  If you are I’m quitting you right here.”

“It’s only because you are the decentest man I happen to know,” said Selwyn resentfully.  “Probably she’d turn you down, anyway.  But—­” and he brightened up, “I dare say she’ll choose the best to be had; it’s a pity though—­”

“What’s a pity?”

“That a charming, intellectual, sensitive, innocent girl like that should be turned over to a plain lump of a man.”

“When you’ve finished your eulogy on our sex,” said Lansing, “I’ll walk home with you.”

“Come on, then; I can talk while I walk; did you think I couldn’t?”

And as they struck through the first cross street toward Lexington Avenue:  “It’s a privilege for a fellow to know that sort of a girl—­so many surprises in her—­the charmingly unexpected and unsuspected!—­the pretty flashes of wit, the naive egotism which is as amusing as it is harmless. . . .  I had no idea how complex she is. . . .  If you think you have the simple feminine on your hands—­forget it, Boots!—­for she’s as evanescent as a helio-flash and as stunningly luminous as a searchlight. . . .  And here I’ve been doing the benevolent prig, bestowing society upon her as a man doles out indigestible stuff to a kid, using a sort of guilty discrimination in the distribution—­”

“What on earth is all this?” demanded Lansing; “are you perhaps non compos, dear friend?”

“I’m trying to tell you and explain to myself that little Miss Erroll is a rare and profoundly interesting specimen of a genus not usually too amusing,” he replied with growing enthusiasm.  “Of course, Holly Erroll was her father, and that accounts for something; and her mother seems to have been a wit as well as a beauty—­which helps you to understand; but the brilliancy of the result—­aged nineteen, mind you—­is out of all proportion; cause and effect do not balance. . . .  Why, Boots, an ordinary man—­I mean an everyday fellow who dines and dances and does the harmlessly usual about town, dwindles to anaemic insignificance when compared to that young girl—­even now when she’s practically undeveloped—­when her intelligence is like an uncut gem still in the matrix of inexperience—­”