It was to him wholly natural that Rosamond Mearely—being, for all her beauty and wealth, only a woman after all and therefore an inferior—should have decided to entrain him; because, forsooth, he was a man. He did not see how she could have chosen better in all Roseborough.
Literally he rose to do that which was demanded of him; for he stood up in his cart and laid hold of the wall with both hands. By standing on tiptoe he could just reach the ledge near where her two finely turned arms rested.
“Goodness me!” she exclaimed with a trace of the Poplars Farm in her accents. “Suppose your horse walks off and leaves you hanging to my wall like—like a tom-cod in a fish market?”
He interrupted her.
“Mrs. Mearely! I said just now that I would carry any message of yours wherever and whither you desire. I said even more. I said that I would be pleased to do so. I meant it. I mean it still. Mrs. Mearely! Can I tell you—may I tell you....” He gulped. “Mrs. Mearely I have long—Mrs. Mearely! I have often thought over the little sentiments I might one day express to you. That is to say, when I should see you again as I see you now, that is to say, without the black-edged habiliments of woe....”
“Oh, my frock? I see. You are going to pay me compliments.”
(She was asking him to pay her compliments! She was making it easy for him!)
He beamed at her—the eager, engaging young creature, so artful, yet artless, too—the pursuing feminine.
“I have considered, in a poetical way, what I would say if I saw you first in something—er—green. Some little phrase about the grass and verdant innocence. Or, in pink. I had that thoroughly outlined, too; because we thought, Mrs. Bunny and I, that the likeliest hue would be a pastel pink.”
Her fair white forehead puckered; her perfect eyebrows lifted.