“Why, yes, I think I should, rather. I’m getting tired of never being settled.”
“But does he want to marry you?”
“We’ve talked about it often. He hates the idea of not marrying me.”
“He’d like to go away with you and live on the top of a mountain remote from mankind, or upon a coral island in the Pacific with nothing but the sound of the surf and the cocoanuts dropping idly one by one, wouldn’t he?”
“Well, he did say he wished we could go away somewhere all alone. How did you guess? How clever you are, Sylvia!” Lily exclaimed, opening wide her deep-blue eyes.
“My dear girl, when a man knows that it’s impossible to be married either because he’s married already or for any other reason, he always hymns a solitude for two. You never heard any man with serious intentions propose to live with his bride-elect in an Alpine hut or under a lonely palm. The man with serious intentions tries to reconcile his purse, not his person, with poetic aspirations. He’s in a quandary between Hampstead and Kensington, not between mountain-tops and lagoons. I suppose he has also talked of a dream-child—a fairy miniature of his Lily?” Sylvia went on.
“We have talked about a baby,” Lily admitted.
“The man with serious intentions talks about the aspect of the nursery and makes reluctant plans to yield, if compelled to, the room he had chosen for his study.”
“You make fun of everything,” Lily murmured, rather sulkily.
“But, my dear,” Sylvia argued, “for me to be able to reproduce Hector’s dream so accurately proves that I’m building to the type. I’ll speculate further. I’m sure he has regretted the irregular union and vowed that, had he but known at first what an angel of purity you were, he would have died rather than propose it.”