"Suppose one had a maid, Daffy—a real maid ... a maid who mended your things ... did your hair while you read...."
"Oh! here goes," and she stood up and grappled with the task of undressing.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
The Two Proposals of Mr. Magnet
§ 1
It was presently quite evident to Marjorie that Mr. Magnet intended to propose marriage to her, and she did not even know whether she wanted him to do so.
She had met him first the previous summer while she had been staying with the Petley-Cresthams at High Windower, and it had been evident that he found her extremely attractive. She had never had a real grown man at her feet before, and she had found it amazingly entertaining. She had gone for a walk with him the morning before she came away—a frank and ingenuous proceeding that made Mrs. Petley-Crestham say the girl knew what she was about, and she had certainly coquetted with him in an extraordinary manner at golf-croquet. After that Oxbridge had swallowed her up, and though he had called once on her mother while Marjorie was in London during the Christmas vacation, he hadn't seen her again. He had written—which was exciting—a long friendly humorous letter about nothing in particular, with an air of its being quite the correct thing for him to do, and she had answered, and there had been other exchanges. But all sorts of things had happened in the interval, and Marjorie had let him get into quite a back place in her thoughts—the fact that he was a member of her father's club had seemed somehow to remove him from a great range of possibilities—until a drift in her mother's talk towards him and a letter from him with an indefinable change in tone towards intimacy, had restored him to importance. Now here he was in the foreground of her world again, evidently more ardent than ever, and with a portentous air of being about to do something decisive at the very first opportunity. What was he going to do? What had her mother been hinting at? And what, in fact, did the whole thing amount to?
Marjorie was beginning to realize that this was going to be a very serious affair indeed for her—and that she was totally unprepared to meet it.
It had been very amusing, very amusing indeed, at the Petley-Cresthams', but there were moments now when she felt towards Mr. Magnet exactly as she would have felt if he had been one of the Oxbridge tradesmen hovering about her with a "little account," full of apparently exaggerated items....