"You've got my view," he said, after a pensive second. "I always get off here and lean over that rail for a bit. May I do so to-day?"
"It's your gate," she said, amiably; "you got it first. It's for you to say if I may sit on it."
He slipped off the horse. "Let me introduce you to Caesar," he said; and she patted Caesar's neck, and remarked how soft his nose was, and secretly deplored the ugliness of equine teeth. Ramage tethered the horse to the farther gate-post, and Caesar blew heavily and began to investigate the hedge.
Ramage leaned over the gate at Ann Veronica's side, and for a moment there was silence.
He made some obvious comments on the wide view warming toward its autumnal blaze that spread itself in hill and valley, wood and village, below.
"It's as broad as life," said Mr. Ramage, regarding it and putting a well-booted foot up on the bottom rail.
Part 7
"And what are you doing here, young lady," he said, looking up at her face, "wandering alone so far from home?"
"I like long walks," said Ann Veronica, looking down on him.
"Solitary walks?"
"That's the point of them. I think over all sorts of things."
"Problems?"
"Sometimes quite difficult problems."
"You're lucky to live in an age when you can do so. Your mother, for instance, couldn't. She had to do her thinking at home--under inspection."
She looked down on him thoughtfully, and he let his admiration of her free young poise show in his face.
"I suppose things have changed?" she said.
"Never was such an age of transition."
She wondered what to. Mr. Ramage did not know. "Sufficient unto me is the change thereof," he said, with all the effect of an epigram.
"I must confess," he said, "the New Woman and the New Girl intrigue me profoundly. I am one of those people who are interested in women, more interested than I am in anything else. I don't conceal it. And the change, the change of attitude! The way all the old clingingness has been thrown aside is amazing. And all the old--the old trick of shrinking up like a snail at a touch. If you had lived twenty years ago you would have been called a Young Person, and it would have been your chief duty in life not to know, never to have heard of, and never to understand."