“Exactly,” agreed Steve. “But that’s my reputation again, you see. They’re afraid you may go down before my fatal fascination.”
“I hardly know what to make of you,” she said, looking at him curiously. “If another man spoke as you’re doing, about his ‘reputation’ and ‘fascination’ and so on, I’d think him the most insufferably conceited prig. And somehow you don’t seem that.”
“I’m not,” he assured her promptly. “It’s other people who seem to insist that every girl I meet must admire me. I know better, thank Heaven. I don’t want ’em to, and least of all do I want you to. It would be a most confounded nuisance for one thing. You might expect me to take you out walking when I didn’t want to walk and want to go riding with me when I wanted to go by myself, and forbid my going to the township, and expect me to give up drinking and smoking, and think I ought to go and sit in the house with you every evening.”
She could contain herself no longer, and her laugh rang out ripplingly.
“It’s all very well to laugh,” he said reprovingly. “But you know what the average man and girl are when they’re courting. It must be deucedly awkward when they’re living on the same place. It’s all right to be making love to a girl, coming across her at odd times, if there’s nothing else to do, but I fancy it would be too much of a strain to keep it up.”
“I could imagine it would be,” she admitted.
“I know I should get horribly tired of it, and of her,” he said; “I do of most girls, anyway——”
“Unstable as water,” she put in softly.
“Now I’ll bet that’s a quotation from your uncle’s warning,” he said triumphantly. “You gave it away that time.”
“Not necessarily,” she retorted. “I might merely have quoted it as applying to your own description of yourself.”