"I shouldn't believe it," the young villain told her, gazing into her flushed face. "Not unless I heard it out of a girl's own mouth! Not unless she cared enough to say so first!"
Here Elizabeth broke off the story with a defiant "So you see!"
"What did you say?" I urged.
Neither of them would ever tell me. However! Before kind Mrs. Price returned (to see they did not repeat that old story of Alfred and the Cakes!) Elizabeth had said whatever it was.
In this proposal-scene she, the girl, had been forced to take the initiative.
That went against all my instincts; I couldn't have done that. How human beings vary! For she, strange little thing, simply loved being made to "make the running." This I didn't understand.
"He understood. He's not like that great hulking brute you prophesied for me, the one who would trample on me with policemen's seventeens! You thought I would be 'tamed' by somebody bullying me. That's not what happens to a girl like me; that's all wrong psychology," babbled my chum exultantly, while I realized that the last phrase at least must have come from him. "It's only the frilly, helpless, overfeminized weepers that admire these huge, bullying navvies with ugly faces and muscles like vegetable marrows! I'd have been safe from them for ever! But he's so wonderful! He's not a usual young man——"
"And you're not a usual girl," I told her affectionately. "My dears! There is only one thing to be said: you certainly have found each other!"