so glad to have you with us."

He stopped at once, gave me his hand, and bent on me his clear gaze.
"Thank you." And then, immediately: "You live here? In Nantucket?"

"Yes."

"All the year round?"

"Practically."

"That is very interesting." Again his clear gaze appraised me. "May I
walk a little way with you? I have no friends here, and I want to ask a
lot of questions about the island."

The thing which struck me most as we talked was his utter lack of
self-consciousness. He gave himself to the subject in hand as if it were
a vital matter, and as if he swept all else aside. It is a quality
possessed by few New Englanders; it is, indeed, a quality possessed by
few Americans. So when he offered to walk with me, it seemed perfectly
natural that I should let him. Not one man in a thousand could have made
such a proposition without an immediate erection on my part of the
barriers of conventionality. To have erected any barrier in this
instance would have been an insult, to my perception of the kind of man
with whom I had to deal.

He was a gentleman, individual, and very much in earnest; and more than
all, he was immensely attractive. There was charm in that clear blue
gaze of innocence. Yet it was innocence plus knowledge, plus something
which as yet I could not analyze.