"You are awfully cautious." She rose undecidedly, and presently she sat down again with a little sigh.
"I have to be. That is my business—from half-past eight till four. Perhaps it's growing on me."
"I don't mean that. Ton were born cautions; you'd be cautions anyway."
"I'm a Down-easter, you know. Look before you leap. Perhaps I shall learn the off-hand Western ways in time. I'll try to. I'll make myself over."
"I wonder if you can," she said, half to herself. Then aloud:
"But I don't believe all Down-easters are as careful as you are. There must be lots of them who would have just laid the whip on that horse, and run over a boy or two, and knocked our gate-post to pieces, and come up to the door with a wheel just ready to break to flinders. Why couldn't you have done it? I shouldn't have minded it—I should have liked it first-rate." She spoke with a kind of lingering drawl, and there was a half-smile in her lack-lustre eye.
"Your father would have minded it, though, and so should I. Never begin to dance without arranging about the fiddler—good rule, don't you think?"
She threw a bare stem to the ground. "Oh, yes; but tiresome." She rose. "Close in here, isn't it? Let's go outside."