"Well," I answered, "it can't be helped now. You must get into my boat at once—I'll send one of Salter's men down to fetch your canoe—and we must row straight back to Oxford immediately."
She obeyed me mechanically, and I began to pull away for very life. "There's nothing for it now," I said pensively, "except to propose to you. I half meant to do it before, and now I've quite made up my mind. Will you have me?"
Ida looked at me without surprise, but with a little pleasure in her face. "What nonsense!" she said quietly. "I knew you were going to propose to me this afternoon, and so I came out alone to keep out of your way. You haven't had time to make up your mind properly yet."
As I looked at her beautiful calm face and lovely eyes I forgot everything. In a moment, I was over head and ears in love again, and conscious of nothing else. "Ida," I cried, looking at her steadily, "Ida!"
"Now, please stop," said Ida, before I could get any further. "I know exactly what you're going to say. You're going to say, 'Ida, I love you.' Don't desecrate the verb to love by draggling it more than it has already been draggled through all the grammars of every European language. I've conjugated to love, myself, in English, French, German, and Italian; and you've conjugated it in Latin and Greek, and for aught I know in Anglo-Saxon and Coptic and Assyrian as well; so now let's have done with it for ever, and conjugate some other verb more worthy the attention of two rational and original human beings. Can't you strike out a line for yourself?"
"You're quite mistaken," I answered curtly, for I wasn't going to be browbeaten in that way; "I meant to say nothing of the sort. What I did mean to say—and I'll trouble you to listen to it attentively—was just this. You seem to me about as well suited to my abstract requirements as any other young woman I have ever met: and if you're inclined to take me, we might possibly arrange an engagement."
"What a funny man you are!" she went on innocently. "You don't propose at all en règle. I've had twelve men propose to me separately in a boat in America, and you make up the baker's dozen: but all the others leaned forward lackadaisically, dropped the oars when they were beginning to get serious, and looked at me sentimentally; while you go on rowing all the time as if there was nothing unusual in it."
"Probably," I suggested, "your twelve American admirers attached more importance to the ceremony than I do. But you haven't answered my question yet."
"Let me ask you one instead," she said, more seriously. "Do you think I'm at all the kind of person for a Senior Proctor's wife? You say I suit your abstract requirements, but one can't get married in the abstract, you know. Viewed concretely, don't you fancy I'm about the most unsuitable helpmate you could possibly light upon?"
"The profound consciousness of that indubitable fact," I replied carelessly, "has made me struggle in a hopeless sort of way against the irresistible impulse to propose to you ever since I saw you first. But I suppose Senior Proctors are much the same as other men. They fly like moths about the candle, and can't overcome the temptation of singeing their wings."