"They are only girls," said Aubrey disdainfully. "Not angels."
"Do angels have red hair?" asked Boodles.
"Only a very few," said the boy. "Boodles--and one or two others whose names I can't remember just now. It's not red hair, sweetheart. It's golden, and your beautiful skin is golden too, and there is a lot of gold-dust scattered all over your nose."
"Freckles," laughed Boodles. "Aubrey, you silly! Calling my ugly freckles gold-dust! Why, I hate them. When I look in the glass I say to myself: 'Boodles, you're a nasty little spotted toad.'"
"They are just lovely," declared the boy. "They are little bits of sunshine that have dropped on you and stuck there."
"What a dear stupid thing!" sighed Boodles. "Let me kiss your lovely pink and white girl's face--there--and there--and there."
"Boodles, dear, I haven't got a girl's face," protested Aubrey.
"Oh, but you have, my boy. It's just like a girl's--only prettier. If I was you, and you was me--that sounds rather shocking grammar, but it don't matter--every one would say: 'Look at that ugly boy with that boodle-oodle, lovely, _bu_tiful girl.' There! I've squeezed every bit of breath out of him," cried Boodles.
There was a certain amount left, as she soon discovered; enough to smother her.
"If you hadn't got golden hair, and freckles, I should never have fallen in love with you," declared the boy. "If you were to lose your freckles, if you lost only one, the tiniest of them all, I shouldn't love you any more."
"And if you lose that dear girl's face I won't love you," promised Boodles. "If you had a horrid moustache to tickle me and make me sneeze, I wouldn't give you the smallest, teeniest, wee bit of a kiss. Well, you can't anyhow, because you've got to be an admiral. How nice it will be when you are grown up and have a lot of ships of your own."
"We shall be married long before then. Boodles, darling," cried the eager boy. "Directly I am twenty-one we will be married. Only five more years."
"Such a lot happens in a year," sighed Boodles. "You may meet five more girls far more sunshiny than me, with redder hair and more freckles, since you are so fond of them--"
"I shan't. You are the only girl who ever was or shall be."
That is how boys talk when they are sixteen, and when they are twenty-six, and sometimes when they are very old boys of sixty; and girls generally believe them.