“Well—it has always seemed so to me.” She colored, more angry with herself than with him. “I don’t pretend to any great amount of experience, but you are so ridiculously literal.”
“You make cocksure assertions, and then get in a rage if I treat them respectfully. When I don’t, you hiss at me like a snake. I don’t complain, however, for I am now a qualified and hardened subject for matrimony.”
“I suppose you mean that I will make all other women seem like angels. You will have something to thank me for.”
“If any man ever has the courage to propose to you, and you bend so far as to accept him, and his courage carries him as far as the altar, is it your intention to nag him through life as you have nagged me in the past three weeks?”
“Have I nagged you?” She turned her wondering eyes upon him. “I never—so I thought—have treated any one so well.”
“Great God!” But he was nonplussed at her sudden change of front, as he always was. “There have been times,” he continued in a moment, “when you have been quite the most charming woman in the world.”
Her wondering eyes were still on his, the rest of her face as immobile as the Sphinx. He blundered along.
“I have been on the verge of proposing to you more than once.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You have a way of breaking the spell just at the critical moment. I am never sure whether the you I am sometimes in love with is really there or only assumed, like one of your rarely worn gowns. There are times when I think you have every possibility, and others when I believe you to be merely a more subtle variety of the American flirt.”