“But me purtic’ly?” he persisted, earnestly.
“Oh, yes,” she replied, absent-mindedly. Then the odd nature of the question occurred to her, but she was too distrait to think consecutively, and she added no comment to her answer.
“Well, it eases me to hear yeh say thet,” he went on, with awkward deliberation, “fer they’s somethin’ I’ve be’n wantin’ to say to yeh fer a long time. I don’t s’paose you reelize haow well off I am?” She did not answer. Her mind seemed to refuse to act, and she heard only the sound of his words. He took her reply for granted and continued:
“I c’d eena’most buy up thet farm there”—pointing over to the Fairchild acres on the slope, now within sight—“’n’ I ain’t so all-fired sure yit thet I won’t, nuther! But what’s th’ good o’ money, on-less yeh kin git what yeh want with it, ay?”
The impulse of her soul-weariness was to let this aimless question pass like the other, without reply. But she was reminded of the importance of being pleasant to this tedious man, and so answered, entirely at random:
“What is it you want, Milton?”
“I dunnao—I’m kind o’ feared o’ puttin’ my foot in it; yeh won’t be mad ef I tell yeh?”
“Why no, of course not. What is it?”
“Well, then,” he blurted out, “I want yeou!” The girl looked dumbly at him, at first not realizing at all the meaning of his words, then held as in a vise between the disposition to reply to him as he deserved and the danger, the terrible danger, of angering him. There fluttered through her senses, too, a mad kind of yearning to shriek with laughter—born of the hysterical state of her long-oppressed nerves. She eventually neither rebuked nor laughed, but said vacuously:
“Want me?”