“Well, I am,” said Selby, fervently; “that’s the truth. I can’t speak for you; but _I_ am. I’m partial to your looks and your ways, and everything about you. I like the way you sit still and knit, and I like you in your dairy and out here. You’re just all I want as far as I can see. I like you when you’re scolding. I was a little bit frightened at first; but afterwards I liked that as well as the rest.”
“Well, you’re a bold man to be partial to a woman when she’s scolding,” said Joan, a little mollified; “but I don’t know much about you, Mr. Selby, and I can’t say I’m partial to you.”
“That’s because you don’t know me,” he said promptly; “make as many inquiries as you like, I am not afraid of them. You’ll find I have a good character wherever I’ve been. I don’t see why I shouldn’t make you happy as well as another. I’ve nothing behind me that I’m ashamed of. You and I at Heatonshaw, with plenty of beasts in the stables, and the house furnished to please you, and a bit of a phaeton in the coach-house: I don’t see why we mightn’t be very snug together,” he said, and as he spoke he took Joan’s hand, which, though a little red in the fingers and brown on the back, was a shapely hand notwithstanding all her work. Then she was seized all at once, and without warning, with that _fou rire_.
“If you mean courting, Mr. Selby, it’s a bit public here,” she said, discharging a load from her breast in that peal of laughter. He was a little offended for the moment; but then he comforted himself that laughing was near to crying, and that crying would have been a very good sign indeed. At his age he had a little experience more than falls to the lot of a youth at the ordinary love-making age.
“I hope you’re not just laughing at me, Joan.”
“I’m laughing at myself as well--and at you too. I’m old to have a lad, and I never looked for such a thing--and you’re old,” Joan added. “I think you’re too old for me.”
“I am forty-one; which is not a bad age. Just suitable, I think,” he said.
Then she looked at him again with the laughter in her eyes. He was a very “wiselike” man--nothing to be ashamed at, whoever saw him--very good-looking indeed; more satisfactory in that way than Joan felt herself to be. And Heatonshaw was a pretty place; and a house all of her own was better than a house in which her father might interfere arbitrarily every day, or even her mother change all the arrangements some fine morning in a fit of absence or compunction. She turned round and began to walk towards the house, suddenly becoming serious. Selby turned too and walked with her. He did not say a word as they went over the fields and through the garden of the White House, but waited her pleasure in a deferential way which went to Joan’s heart. But she was not “partial” to him. “We can talk of this some other time” was all that she said.