"I could not bear you not to love me. Once I knew a young woman whose lover forsook her and she used to work woollen flowers all day long with a tambour frame, because she was working woollen flowers when he told her that he loved her, and she never did anything else all the years that we knew her; and, Amor, she is working them now, and oh, I'm afraid when I think of her working those woollen flowers."
Vernon in his new frame of mind could scarcely forbear telling his love of the ills he had intended towards her. He had caught a passion for frankness and would have poured into her ears the whole of his past. He could not endure, to such elation had he been carried, that Phyllida should be ignorant of the worst of him in order that for the future she should know more truly the very best of him. But he was wise and, though Cupid had lent him his own wings, he would not play too many aerial pranks, soar too near the sun, fall and break his neck. It was indeed a form of abnegation that prevented him from showing Phyllida his own bad self. It was bitter to hear her murmur, with a white hand on his sleeve.
"I knew you were true, my true love, all the time, all the time."
Nothing tugs at the heart-strings of a man like a young maid's plighting of her troth. Nothing makes his brain reel like her first kiss freely given.
"Oh, Phyllida, Phyllida! I'm not fit for you."
"Foolish Amor."
"Are you happy, my dearest?"
"We shall never be parted again."
"Never!"