"I'll try not."
"H'm. You think it will need an effort."
Jeannie laughed.
"Once upon a time a man went out fishing for compliments—" she began.
"And he didn't catch any," said Tom.
"Not one. And now we've chattered enough, and you shall tell me all about yourself."
It was a very quiet and simple history that she heard, and all told it amounted to the fact that he had settled down as he told her nearly a year ago he was thinking of doing, but without marrying. There was little to say, and in that little he was characteristically modest. For the greater part of the year he had been down at his place in Wiltshire, of which he had been so studiously absentee a landlord, and for the first time had taken his place as a big landowner, and that which, with rather a wry face, he alluded to as a "county magnate."
It was from other sources that Jeannie knew how modest this account was, and at the end—
"Tom, you're a brick!" she said.