you came in to meet Tom for the first time? How
you wouldn't for anything in the whole world let yourself get tangled up
again with caring for a person?"

"Perfectly. I could only picture it as meaning more of trouble and
unrest. But things change, dear. We change. There has taken place in me
since that, no matter for what reason, an increase of self-confidence
and confidence in fate such as turns men into nuisances or makes them
successful. In the last twenty-four hours particularly. Now, as I look
at the inconvenience of getting tangled up again with caring for a
person, I find I don't mean at all to suffer. I mean to bother you until
you say yes, and then to be happy. You could never wilfully torment me,
I know; you are incapable of it. Then, when you have graciously
consented to marry me, I feel as if I might build up my life on new
lines."

"I can't, Geraldino; I can't."

"You can't. So you have said. And I have asked you to tell me your
reasons, that I may combat them one by one."

"It's no use. We're too different."

"That we are different, thank God! is a reason for and not against."

"No, no; not when it's such a huge difference. We're like--a bird and a
fish."

"Don't call me a fish. I object."

"We don't think the same about hardly anything."

"But we feel alike on everything of importance."

"There's hardly a thing I do that's quite right as you see it. No, don't
take the trouble to contradict me; let me do the talking for a minute.
You're so critical and so conventional and so correct! No matter how
much you say you aren't, you _are_. And while we're like this I
don't have to care. I rather enjoy shocking you. And while I'm none of
your business, you don't have to care what I do or what I'm like. We can
have our fun and be awfully fond of each other, and it's all serene and
right. But if I were Mrs. Gerald Fane, all my faults and shortcomings,
my not knowing the things that everybody in your society knows, my not
having any elegant accomplishments, would show up so glaring that I
should know you must be mortified. You couldn't help it."

"Stop, dear! You enrage me. You put me beside myself. You are so
superficial. And dense. And you hold me up to myself in the features of
a beastly cad! I won't have it. For one thing, let me tell you that if I
were the Lord Ronald Macdonald of that song we've heard Miss Felixson
sing, and you were that canny lass Leezie Lindsay, I should know jolly
well that