“Well, if I must be accurate--” she began.
“Of course you must!” snapped the Philosopher. “Accuracy is always desirable, and accuracy is what you women always fail in! Briefly,--to be perfectly accurate, you gave him a rose. Didn’t you?”
She nodded with a charmingly assumed air of mock penitence.
“To a noodle like that,” said the Philosopher, sternly, “the gift of a rose from you means encouragement. You have given him an inch--he will take an ell. Of course if you _wish_ to encourage him--”
“Encourage him in what?” she asked, demurely.
“In--in--his attentions to you,” said the Philosopher.
“I don’t consider it a good match,” went on the Philosopher.
“Oh! Wouldn’t it light?” she asked, innocently. “I thought it was a wax one--not one of those things that must have its own box.”
The Philosopher’s mouth twitched under his moustache and his eyes sparkled. But he maintained a dignified demeanour.
“I wasn’t speaking of either a Vesta or of a Bryant and May,” he said. “And you know I wasn’t.”
She drew a small rustic bench towards him and sat down very nearly at his feet,--then looked up from under her garden hat.
The Philosopher wished her eyes would not swim in such liquid blue, and that the garden hat was not quite so becoming.
“Nothing that you would care for,” he answered, with condescending politeness. “It’s called ‘The Natural Evolution and Decay of Nations’.”
“_I_ know!” she said. “It’s all the same thing and it all seems no use. Nations begin and grow and progress, and then just like fruit they get over-ripe and the wasps begin to eat them and they rot and fall off the tree. Oh, yes! It can all be said in quite a few lines. There’s really no occasion to write a thick book about it; unless the man wants to show himself off.”
“The man! Show himself off! You foolish child! The man is a Fellow of Balliol and a most profound scholar.”
“Is he?” And she shrugged her pretty shoulders indifferently. “Well, I suppose he wants the public to know it.”
The Philosopher was for the moment rendered speechless. He looked down at her, but her face was bent and he could only see the crown of the garden hat; there was a most absurd little knot of ribbon on that crown, perfectly useless and half lost in a twisted mist of pale blue chiffon.