“It certainly is unideal. And every Jack has his Jill. I don’t doubt that—don’t in the least believe a man could be equally happy with any one of a hundred charming and intelligent women—not if he wanted the best out of life. But it is fortunate, perhaps, that the majority don’t do any deep imagining. Then you think yourself capable of being faithful to a memory?” he added, curiously.
“I know I could be—and happy, in a way; certainly far happier than if I settled down into a commonplace content with another man. It is the inner life that counts, nothing else.”
“How did you know you would be brave in battle before you were ever in one?”
“Didn’t. Was awfully afraid I’d funk it.”
“Well,” she said, laughing, “perhaps that wasn’t a fortunate comparison. But one can have intuitions without experience, especially if one lives a more or less solitary life, and thinks. However, I have visions of myself as an old maid on the ranch with half a dozen adopted children. Falling in love is too hard work.”
“Well—it has always seemed so to me.” She colored, more angry with herself than with him. “I don’t pretend to any great amount of experience, but you are so ridiculously literal.”
“You make cocksure assertions, and then get in a rage if I treat them respectfully. When I don’t, you hiss at me like a snake. I don’t complain, however, for I am now a qualified and hardened subject for matrimony.”
“I suppose you mean that I will make all other women seem like angels. You will have something to thank me for.”
“If any man ever has the courage to propose to you, and you bend so far as to accept him, and his courage carries him as far as the altar, is it your intention to nag him through life as you have nagged me in the past three weeks?”
“Have I nagged you?” She turned her wondering eyes upon him. “I never—so I thought—have treated any one so well.”
“Great God!” But he was nonplussed at her sudden change of front, as he always was. “There have been times,” he continued in a moment, “when you have been quite the most charming woman in the world.”
Her wondering eyes were still on his, the rest of her face as immobile as the Sphinx. He blundered along.
“I have been on the verge of proposing to you more than once.”