“I shouldn’t want to,” I say. I think I am getting on; but she looks at me as if puzzled, half displeased.
“May is engaged,” she answers, “and I am not. I have been, though.”
“Dear me,” I answer, heedlessly; “how old——”
“Seventeen. But I never had a gen’leman ask me such a question before.”
She is silent; I speechless. Yet I wish she would pronounce the t in “gentleman.” She does not bear malice long, but asks “where I come from?”
“Boston,” I say; “and I am twenty-three.”
She laughs merrily, in forgiveness, with a dear, lovable, quick sense of humor. Then she scans me curiously. “I never saw a gen’leman from Boston before.”
“There are some there,” I answer, humbly.
“Of course we see plenty of commercial travellers,” she says, and the conversation languishes. I look out the window, for suggestions, at the tall mountain timber and the bearded gray moss. It suggests nothing but partridges.
“But you have not yet told me whether you can tell us apart.”