"Oh, really?" she said. "I thought that those things had iron constitutions--stand any amount of racket."
"I suppose I should say something about the amount of spirit they consume and that," he remarked, still smiling.
"Too obvious," she said, shaking her head. "Still after the obviousness of my 'iron constitution' you might say anything. What a lovely day it is--just the sort of day for a breakdown!"
She had begun to walk on, saying her last sentence with a sort of good-bye nod and smile.
"Might I walk on a bit with you?" he asked, becoming solemn and pitching his voice half a tone lower. "The fact is"--his voice became lower still, almost confidential--"the chap knows more about the machine than I do, and he works best when let alone."
"Of course you may walk as far as you wish. I shall be only too glad, I can tell you," said she. "I have been having a lot of solitary walks of late, and I'm sick of them. I was longing for some one to talk to."
"I'm sorry you haven't come across some one who is better in that line than myself," said he. "I never was up to much as a talker."
"Why, you talked quite a lot that day when you gave us so nice a lunch."
"Oh, I always talk a lot--no mistake about that; but there's no brains behind it all--no, not even grammar," he added, after an anxious moment.
"You have plenty of brains," she said, looking at him as if her remark had reference to the size of his head and she was verifying it. "What makes you fancy that you've no brains?"
"I do the wrong things so often--things that no chap would do if he had brains enough to think whether he should do them or not."
"Oh, for instance? Gloriana! I've instances enough. Well, go no further than this moment. I'm not sure that another chap--a chap that remembers things, and knows the decent thing to do--would have stopped you in the way I did."
"Why shouldn't you stop me if you wished? Why, you were excessively polite in asking me if you might walk with me to keep you from getting in the way of the chauffeur."
"Of course--that's all right the way you put it; but--but--well, I heard from Mrs. Pearce who you were, and then I read all that in the papers, so that I wasn't sure if--if--it was just the thing, you know."