“Do I need to be told things to know them? I’m not a fine, strong, superior male; therefore I can discover them for myself,” Rosy answered with a dauntless little laugh and a light in her eyes which might indeed have made it appear she was capable of wizardry.
“You make her out at once too passionate and too calculating,” the young man returned. “She has no personal feelings, she wants nothing for herself. She only wants one thing in the world—to make the poor a little less poor.”
“Precisely; and she regards you, a helpless, blundering bachelor, as one of them.”
“She knows I’m not helpless so long as you’re about the place, and that my blunders don’t matter so long as you correct them.”
“She wants to assist me to assist you then!” the girl exclaimed with the levity with which her earnestness was always interfused: it was a spirit that seemed of a sudden, in argument, to mock at her own contention. “Besides, isn’t that the very thing you want to bring about?” she went on. “Isn’t that what you’re plotting and working and waiting for? She wants to throw herself into it—to work with you.”
“My dear girl, she doesn’t understand a pennyworth of what I think. She couldn’t if she would.”
“And no more do I, I suppose you mean.”
“No more do you; but with you it’s different. If you would you could. However, it matters little who understands and who doesn’t, for all there happens to be of it. I’m not doing much, you know.”
Rosy lay there looking up at him. “It must be pretty thick when you talk that way. However, I don’t care what you bring on, for I know I shall be looked after.”
“Nothing’s going to happen—nothing’s going to happen,” Paul remarked simply.