"You must not dream of that. Men have to work there."
"Then you'll do the only thing to stop me from such an awful fate? You'll take me for better for worse? You'll join your fat lands to my lean ones? You'll——"
"Don't," she said, rather bitterly, "don't laugh at me and mine in the midst of a proposal of marriage. Somehow it makes my blood run cold, though I'm not sentimental. Yet marriage—even with you—has a serious side. I want to think how serious. We can't go on laughing for ever."
"Why not? You know the summing-up of a very wise man after he'd devoted his life to philosophy? Nothing is new, and nothing is true, and nothing matters. God bless my own—very own little brown mouse of an Honor! Somehow I had a sneaking hope all along that you would say 'Yes'!"
"I haven't yet."
"Kiss me, and don't quibble at a moment like this. You haven't kissed me since you were fifteen."
But Honor's humour for once deserted her. She tried to conjure thoughts proper to the moment and magnify its solemnity; she made an effort, in some measure pathetic, to feel more than she really felt.
"You'll be wise, clearest Christo; you'll think of me and love me always and——"
"Anything—anything but work for you, sweet," he said, hugging her to himself, and kissing her with a boy's rapture.
"Oh, Christopher, don't say that!"