Poor Tim! He has seen so little of women! We have them in our valley,
of course. But he and I lived much in the great book-land beyond the
hills. We had read together of all the heroines of the romances, and
we knew their little ways and their pretty speeches as well as if we
had ourselves walked with them through a few hundred pages and lived
happily ever after. They had been the women of our world as distinct
from the women of our valley. The last we knew as kindly, honest
persons with a faculty for twisting their English and a woful ignorance
of well-turned speeches. They never said "Fair Sir" nor "Master." But
I had gone from that book-world and had seen the women of the real
world. Here I had the advantage of my brother. Into his life a single
woman had come from the real world. She was different from the women
of our valley. I had known that the moment our eyes met, and by the
way Tim smoked now, and by the tone of his terse inquiry, I knew that
he had met a woman who had said "Fair Sir" to him, and I feared for
him.
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