visiting, though from his speech and manner of a gentleman, someone in
authority. Dear, he was _so_ dear and so Westernly breezy and
progressive and enterprising and so _appallingly candid_. I've been the
"one woman", the "unknown but remembered ideal" since that encounter.
Of course, that was to be said, but strangely enough he meant it. He
was actually and unaffectedly making love to me. He's not so large or
tall, but quick and springy, and muscled like a panther. He's not
beautiful either but pleasant to look at, one of those broad
high-cheeked faces one sees so much in the West, with the funniest
quick yellowish grey eyes and the most disreputable moustache I ever
saw, yellow and ragged, If he must eat it, I wish he would _eat it off
even_ clear across. And he's likely to talk the most execrable slang,
or to quote Browning. But he was making real love, and you know I'm not
used to that. I'm accustomed to go my pace before sharply calculating
eyes, to show if I'm worth the _asking price_. But here was real love
being made off down in the earth (we'd run away from the others because
I _liked him at once_). I don't mind telling you he moved me, partly
because I had wondered about him from that night, and partly because of
all I had come to feel about this new place and the new people, and
because he seemed such a fine, active specimen of Western manhood. I
won't tell you all the wild, lawless thoughts that scurried and
_sneaked_ through my mind--they don't matter now--for all at once it
came out that he was the only son of that wealthy Bines who died awhile
ago--you remember the name was mentioned that night at your house when
they were discussing the exodus of Western millionaires to New York;
some one named the father as one who liked coming to New York to
dissipate occasionally, but who was still rooted in the soil where his
millions grew.

There was the son before me, just _an ordinary man of millions_, after