'Till you came,' I insisted, 'nobody had seen anything.'

He shook his head, but I could read in his face that this was not
news to him.

'That is mainly what I came up to tell you,' I continued, 'to beg
that you will go on and on. To hope that you will stay a long time
and do a great deal. It is such an extraordinary chance that any
one should turn up who can say what the country really means.'

He stuck his hands in his pockets with a restive movement. 'Oh,
don't make me feel responsible,' he said, 'I hate that;' and then
suddenly he remembered his manners. 'But it's certainly nice of you
to think so,' he added.

There was something a little unusual in his inflection which led me
to ask at this point whether he was an American, and to discover
that he came from somewhere in Wisconsin, not directly, but by way
of a few years in London and Paris. This accounted in a way for the
effect of freedom in any fortune about him for which I already liked
him, and perhaps partly for the look of unembarrassed inquiry and
experiment which sat so lightly in his unlined face. He came, one
realized, out of the fermentation of new conditions; he never could
have been the product of our limits and systems and classes in
England. His surroundings, his 'things,' as he called them, were as
old as the sense of beauty, but he seemed simply to have put them
where he could see them, there was no pose in their arrangement.
They were all good, and his delight in them was plain; but he was
evidently in no sense a connoisseur beyond that of natural instinct.