“I am reading the newspaper because I want to know what there is in it.”
“You know all that now, just as well as it you had written it. Put it down, Sir!” And she put her hand on to the top of the sheet. “If we are to be married in three weeks’ time, I expect that you will be a little attentive to me now. You’ll read as many papers as you like after that, no doubt.”
“Upon my word, Nora, I think your uncle is the most unfair man I ever met in my life.”
“Perhaps he thinks the same of you, and that will make it equal.”
“He can’t think the same of me. I defy him to think that I’m unfair. There’s nothing so unfair as hitting a blow, and then running away when the time comes for receiving a counterblow. It’s what your Lord Chatham did, and he never ought to have been listened to in parliament again.”
“That’s a long time ago,” said Nora, who probably felt that her lover should not talk to her about Lord Chatham just three weeks before their marriage.
“I don’t know that the time makes any difference.”
“Ah! but I have got something else that I want to speak about. And, Fred, you mustn’t turn up your nose at what we are all doing here,—as to giving away things I mean.”
“I don’t turn up my nose at it. Haven’t I been begging of every American in Liverpool till I’m ashamed of myself?”
“I know you have been very good, and now you must be more good still,—good to me specially, I mean. That isn’t being good. That’s only being foolish.” What little ceremony had led to this last assertion I need not perhaps explain. “Fred, I’m an Englishwoman to-day, but in a month’s time I shall be an American.”