"Of course you will," my wife broke in, enthusiastically; "but that isn't all. I went to sleep after that, and later on was awakened by a loud—and as I thought at the time—a very angry voice. I went to the window again only to see a laughing scuffle between them over the potato-knife. She wanted to scrape them and he wanted to scrape them. Of course he got the knife, and it really did look too comical to see him work with those little bulbs. He put his whole mind on them, and he didn't catch her picking over the berries until she was nearly done. Then he scolded again. He said he did the potatoes to keep her from getting her thumb and forefinger black, and here she was with her whole hand covered with berry stain. He seemed really vexed, and I must say his voice doesn't carry this far as if he was half as nice as he is. I think there ought to be a chair of voices attached to every school-house—so to speak—and the result of the training made one of the tests of admission to the colleges of the country. Don't you?"
Again I was wholly unprepared for her sudden question, and was only slowly clambering around the idea she had suggested, so I said—somewhat irrelevantly, no doubt—"It may be."
She looked at me for a moment without speaking, and then said, as she got up and crossed the room: "You didn't hear a word I said, and you don't begin to appreciate that man anyway."
"I did hear you, dear," I protested; "I was listening as hard as I could—and awfully interested—but a fellow can't skip along at that rate and have well-matured views on tap without a moment's warning. You've got to be like the noble ladies in the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel,' 'and give me heart and give me time.' Now they understood men. We're slow."
She laughed and tied the last pink bow in the lace of a coquettish little white gown and dragged me out on the veranda.
Our new neighbors were out ahead of us.
"I don't think so at all, Margaret," we heard him say, as we took our chairs near the edge of the porch to catch any stray breeze that might be wandering our way.
"Sh—," we heard her say; "don't talk so loud. They will think you are going to scalp me."
"Oh, don't bother about the neighbors; let 'em hear," said he, "let 'em think. Who cares? If they haven't got anything better to do than sit around and think, they'd better move away from our neighborhood."
"Sh—said she again, looking at him with a good deal of emphasis in her eyes.