He nodded comprehendingly, but hesitated over further words. Then something occurred to him. “Look here!” he said. “If you're as keen about all this, are you game to give up this footling old shop, and devote your time to carrying out my plans, when I've licked 'em into shape?”
She began shaking her head, but then something seemed also to occur to her. “It'll be time enough to settle that when we get to it, won't it?” she observed.
“No—you've got to promise me now,” he told her.
“Well that I won't!” she answered, roundly.
“You'd see the whole—the whole scheme come to nothing, would you?”—he scolded at her—“rather than abate a jot of your confounded mulishness.”
“Aha!” she commented, with a certain alertness of perception shining through the stolidity of her mien. “I knew you were humbugging! If you'd meant what you said, you wouldn't talk about its coming to nothing because I won't do this or that. I ought to have known better. I'm always a goose when I believe what you tell me.”
A certain abstract justice in her reproach impressed him. “No you're not, Lou,” he replied, coaxingly. “I really mean it all—every word of it—and more. It only occurred to me that it would all go better, if you helped. Can't you understand how I should feel that?”
She seemed in a grudging way to accept anew his professions of sincerity, but she resisted all attempts to extract any promise. “I don't believe in crossing a bridge till I get to it,” she declared, when, on the point of his departure, he last raised the question, and it had to be left at that. He took with him some small books she had tied in a parcel, and told him to read. She had spoken so confidently of their illuminating value, that he found himself quite committed to their perusal—and almost to their endorsement. He had thought during the day of running down to Newmarket, for the Cesarewitch was to be run on the morrow, and someone had told him that that was worth seeing. By the time he reached his hotel, however, an entirely new project had possessed his mind. He packed his bag, and took the next train for home.