after I'd carried you off to the Hielands my bride and my
darling to be, it would be a very short time before Lady Ronald
Macdonald had all the airs and tricks of speech of my sisters and
cousins. That, however, is neither here nor there. Who wants you to be
different? Aurora, if you only knew yourself! Ceres, or Summer, or Peace
sitting among the wheat-sheaves, what would it matter that she had not
been educated at a fashionable boarding-school? Let her just breathe and
be,--beautiful, benign, and any man not utterly a fool will prefer to
lie at her knees, keeping still while her silence appeases and
reconciles him, to hearing the most brilliant conversation of a lady
novelist."

"You can talk beautifully, Gerald, that's one sure thing; but talk me
over you can't. Seems to me I should have to be crazy to forget all in a
moment what I've said over and over to myself, and drilled myself not to
lose sight of. After you asked me the other day, though I knew it was
just on the spur of the moment, I thought it all out in the night as
much as if it had been serious, and I saw what would be the one safe
course for little me. I mustn't; that's all there is to it. Everything
is wrong for it to turn out happy in the end. I'm terribly fond of you,
but I should be scared to death of you, simply scared to death, as a
husband. We're not the same kind. If I could forget it on my own
account, I have only to remember how it would strike Estelle. And
Estelle's got no end of horse sense. It's according to horse sense we
must act when it comes to settling the real things of life. I
expect"--she had the effect of turning a page or a corner; she dropped
from heights of argument to low plains--"I expect I shall be big as a
mountain by and by. I don't see any help for it. I starve myself, I
drink hot water, I take exercise,--nearly walk my legs off,--and the
next time I get weighed I've gained three pounds! What's the use? Then,
I'm older than you."

"Not at all. I'm older than the everlasting hills; you are the youngest
thing that lives."

"That's all right, but you were twenty-eight your last birthday, and I'm
thirty. I'm afraid my character's already pretty well fixed in its
present form. When it comes over me, for instance, to play the clown,
I've got to do it or burst. And you're naturally a tyrant, you know."

"I am. I am critical, carping, conventional, and a tyrant, everything
you say, but just because I am those things, you ought