“Well, shall be perfect.”
“That’s very fine,” she presently answered. “It’s vain, after all, for you to talk of my accepting things when you’ll accept nothing from me.”
Ah, THERE, better still, he could meet her. “You attach an impossible condition. That, I mean, of my keeping your gift so to myself.”
Well, she looked, before him there, at the condition—then, abruptly, with a gesture, she gave it up. She had a headshake of disenchantment—so far as the idea had appealed to her. It all appeared too difficult. “Oh, my ‘condition’—I don’t hold to it. You may cry it on the housetops—anything I ever do.”
“Ah well, then—!” This made, he laughed, all the difference.
But it was too late. “Oh, I don’t care now! I SHOULD have liked the Bowl. But if that won’t do there’s nothing.”
He considered this; he took it in, looking graver again; but after a moment he qualified. “Yet I shall want some day to give you something.”
She wondered at him. “What day?”
“The day you marry. For you WILL marry. You must—SERIOUSLY—marry.”
She took it from him, but it determined in her the only words she was to have uttered, all the morning, that came out as if a spring had been pressed. “To make you feel better?”