“Breakers of idols,” she said, softly and musingly. “Destroyers of hope and faith!--cruel mockers of noble effort--”
“That’s it!” and Jack got up from the grass, and stretched his supple, elegant figure of which he might have been proud,--but he wasn’t. “And you’ll find your Philosopher comes up to the scratch in all those particulars when you put him through his paces. ‘The Deterioration of Language Invariably Perceived’ is nothing to the Deterioration of a Man who thinks himself superior to all other men.”
She rose from her bank of moss and thyme and stood for a minute, looking at the river.
“How lovely it is here!” she said. “I should like to stay here for hours!”
“So should I,” agreed Jack, “with _you_!”
She laughed, and looking up at him, flushed a pretty rose-colour.
“As brass!” he responded, gaily. “I’m not a Philosopher!”
She lowered her eyes, and they began to walk homeward together. After a pause, Jack suddenly laid an entreating hand on her arm.
“He won’t ask me to!” she rejoined, with a smile.
“Oh, Jack! Can’t you see? He’s far too much of a Philosopher to marry! A wife would bore him to death!”
“And he’d bore a wife to death, that’s certain!” said Jack. “Well!--I suppose I must hope for the best! Anyway--you’ll try--yes, try to like me a little?”
“No need to try!” she answered, sweetly. “I like you very, _very_ much! Oh, Jack, yes! We must always be the very best friends in the world! Swear it!”
She extended her pretty little ungloved hand, and Jack, moved by the spirit of the occasion, took off his hat, dropped on one knee and kissed it.
“Splendid! Like a knight in a fairy tale!”
“Fairy tales sometimes come true,” he said, as he sprang up from his chivalric attitude. “I’ve made a vow, and I mean to keep it!”
She peeped at him under her golden eyelashes.
“Good Jack!” she said. “You ought to be very, very rich,--oh, immensely rich!”
“Because you would do so many kind things with your money,” she answered. “You couldn’t help doing them!”
“True!” he declared, with a grandiloquent air. “I would even pay for you to go to a Cinema! I _would_!”
Her delightful laughter was like that of a happy child. They went on, pacing slowly over the warm short grass, a pretty pair to look at, such as Herrick might have sung of, or Shakespeare, when he carolled of “the ring-time and the spring-time” and of “sweet lovers” who love the spring. Only they were not lovers. The pretty Sentimentalist loved Love in the abstract, and feared disillusion in its reality.