“Well, can’t she do without that?”
“Evidently she can—and evidently she does, beautifully. But the question is whether I can!”
He had paused once more with his point—but she glared, poor Cornelia, with her wonder. “Surely if you know for yourself——!”
“Ah, it doesn’t seem enough for me to know for myself! One wants a woman,” he argued—but still, in his prolonged tour, quite without his scowl—“to know for one, to know with one. That’s what you do now,” he candidly put to her.
It made her again gape. “Do you mean you want to marry me?”
He was so full of what he did mean, however, that he failed even to notice it. “She doesn’t in the least know, for instance, how old I am.”
“That’s because you’re so young!”
“Ah, there you are!”—and he turned off afresh and as if almost in disgust. It left her visibly perplexed—though even the perplexed Cornelia was still the exceedingly pointed; but he had come to her aid after another turn. “Remember, please, that I’m pretty well as old as you.”
She had all her point at least, while she bridled and blinked, for this. “You’re exactly a year and ten months older.”
It checked him there for delight. “You remember my birthday?”