“You say you’ve had plenty of offers?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I had had some.”
“Any from men like—like me?”
Chris glanced at him quickly, and shook her head with a little smile, half demure, half mischievous. She answered decidedly:
“No, not at all like you. In the first place, they hadn’t any of them sixpence; in the second place, they were mostly boys, at least what I call boys,” she added, in a tone of patronage.
This delighted Mr. Bradfield. Nobody could reproach him with being a boy.
“And you didn’t care for any of them?”
“Oh, yes, I did. For some of them. In a way.”
“Well, do you think you could ever care for me—in a way, in any way?”