“Yes, I like you,” he admitted. “I have the most absurd feeling for you that any man ever found it impossible to put into words. We have indeed strayed outside the world of natural things,” he added.
“Why?” she murmured. “I never felt more natural or normal in my life. I can assure you that I am loving it. I feel like muslin gowns and primroses and the scent of those first March violets underneath a warm hedge where the sun comes sometimes. I feel very natural indeed, Sir Timothy.”
“What about me?” he asked harshly. “In three weeks' time I shall be fifty years old.”
She laughed softly.
“And in no time at all I shall be thirty—and entering upon a terrible period of spinsterhood!”
“Spinsterhood!” he scoffed. “Why, whenever the Society papers are at a loss for a paragraph, they report a few more offers of marriage to the ever-beautiful Lady Cynthia.”
“Don't be sarcastic,” she begged. “I haven't yet had the offer of marriage I want, anyhow.”
“You'll get one you don't want in a moment,” he warned her.
She made a little grimace.
“Don't!” she laughed nervously. “How am I to preserve my romantic notions of you as the emperor of the criminal world, if you kiss me as you did just now—you kissed me rather well—and then ask me to marry you? It isn't your role. You must light a cigarette now, pat the back of my hand, and swagger off to another of your haunts of vice.”