"Only that when you don't happen to be frightening me out of my wits, you are charming me into a perfect idiot."
"Something between an express train and the Lorelei," laughed Fanny.
But the quick, girlish blood had sprung to her sunny cheeks and lingered a moment, as though it loved the light. They were now in the village—in the broad street where the shops are. At that hour there were many people moving about on foot and in every sort of vehicle, short of broughams and landaus. There was the smart couple in a high buckboard, just out for a morning drive; there was the elderly farmer with his buggy or his hooded cart—his wife seated beside him, with her queer, sad, winter-blighted face, and her decent, but dusty black frock;—there was the young farmer 'sport' driving his favourite trotting horse in a sulky. And of pedestrians there was no end. A smart party bent on a day's excursion by sea came down the board walk, brilliant in perfectly new blue and white serge, with bits of splendid orange and red here and there, fresh faces, light hearts, great appetites, and the most trifling of cares—the care for trifles themselves. Fanny nodded and smiled, and was smiled at, while Lawrence attempted to lift his soft woollen cap from his head with some sort of grace—a thing impossible, as men who wear soft woollen caps well know. But the air seemed lighter and brighter for so much youth laughing in it.
Fanny dived into one shop after another, Lawrence following her, rather awkwardly, as a man always does under the circumstances, until he is old enough to find out that there is a time for watching as well as a time for talking, and that more may be learned of a woman's character from the way she treats shopkeepers than is generally supposed. Fanny showed surprising alternations of firmness and condescension, for she had the gift of managing people and of getting what she wanted, which is a rare gift and one not to be despised. She asked very kindly after the fishmonger's baby, but she did not hesitate to tell the grocer the hardest of truths about the butter.
"I always do my own marketing," she said to Lawrence, in answer to his look of surprise. "It amuses me, and I get much better things. My poor dear cousins don't understand marketing a bit—though they ought to. That's the reason why they never get on, somehow. I believe marketing is the best school in the world for learning what's worth having and what isn't. Don't you?"
"I never had a chance to learn," laughed Lawrence. "I wish you'd teach me how to get on, as you call it."
"Oh—it's very easy! You only need know exactly what you want, and then try to get it as hard as you can. Most people don't know, and don't try."
"For that matter I know perfectly well what I want."
"Then why don't you try and get it?" asked Fanny, pausing at the door of another shop as though interested in his answer.
"I'm not sure that it's in the market," answered the young man, his eyes in hers.