Bayre answered, after a pause, that it was because she read novels and wanted to write them. But it occurred to him, even as he said this, that the real reason for his opinion was that he saw romance sparkling in her eyes, emanating from her, encircling her. She was a figure of romance in herself. Frank, sympathetic, impulsive, imaginative, brimming over with the joy of life, she was the very incarnation of healthy, joyous, budding womanhood, of the womanhood that looks out with eyes full of vague golden hope at the future, and that lives meanwhile in almost ecstatic joy in the present.
“Well,” said she, with a happy smile, “surely it’s rather a shrewd arrangement to use up one’s romantic tendencies by reading novels, and perhaps even by writing them, so that they mayn’t interfere with the prosaic course of one’s actual life.”
“Is actual life prosaic to you?” said Bayre. “A young girl shut up in a lonely and gloomy house with an old guardian who hardly ever speaks to her! I never heard of a less prosaic situation in my life.”
“Ah, well, the prose is to come,” said she, lightly. “Your uncle is very anxious to get me off his hands, and he is to introduce to me to-morrow a certain neighbour of his who, it seems, has been struck by my charms, and who proposes humbly to solicit the honour of my fair hand.”
The girl said this with the most delicious mixture of mischievous amusement and girlish shyness, blushing and looking away, while at the same time her eyes danced with fun and her lips were curved into a smile. Bayre was stupefied, indignant.
He had not the least reason to be, of course.
“And you mean to say that you’re going to let yourself be married off to a man you care no more for than that?” he asked quite sharply.
“I don’t know whether I care for him; I’ve never seen him yet.”
“Never—seen him!”
“At least, not to my knowledge. As he has seen me it’s possible I may recognise his face when he’s formally introduced to me. He lives at Guernsey, and I’m often over there.”