"Are you perfectly satisfied that you never could love me?"
She reddened and her sensitive mouth moved, but she brought her teeth together. "That has nothing to do with it."
"Everything!"
"Nothing!"
"Do you mean to tell me that you are literally contented with your life as it is?—living out here alone with nothing to do but read and look after those confounded chickens? You have the most romantic temperament I have ever met, and the way you gratify it would make an elephant laugh."
"I dream and think of the future."
"Future? You saw what that amounted to when you were in town—"
"I have shaken off the impression. It must have been that I had too much at once—and the purely frivolous, which offended my puritanical streak—"
"You don't like the Bohemian crowd any better."
"There are plenty of others. When I am ready I shall make the plunge and forbid myself to shrink from realities—"