"Quite apart from my own preferences in the matter, Robert, how do you know that Claude wants to marry?"
"Oh, no doubt he doesn't want to. In the eyes of the modern man, marriages made in Heaven are as popular as canned beef made in America. But what of that? Claude is young, self-willed, accustomed to get his own way, and—he worships you. And you—well, I have no superlatives to do justice to the case. You are you. You could marry him in a twinkling if you played your cards right."
Janet laughed.
"Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing—" she sang, saucily.
"Stop coquetting like Cornelia," he remonstrated. "You are making it totally impossible for me to talk rationally. Are you a butterfly or a woman? Am I discussing your glorious voice or your precarious future? Be serious."
"How can I be serious when you ask me to be a bargain hunter in hearts and coronets?"
"Now you're acting like one of Marie Corelli's heroines, Janet!"
"Thank you. Why are you so anxious to have me get married?"
"Because I think that your fine spirit of independence and your divine gift of imagination ought not lightly to be wasted. Because I think, in short, that you have a nobler purpose in the world than mere loving or being loved."
"Than mere loving!"