"You might go on with the song," he said,—"'Love is now a little man—'"
"'And a very naughty one!'" she hummed, with a mischievous upward glance.
Despite his inward vexation, he smiled.
"Say what you like, Cupid is a ridiculous name for a dove," he said.
"It rhymes to stupid," she replied, demurely,—"And the rhyme expresses the nature of the bird and—the god!"
"Pooh! You think that clever!"
"I don't! I never said a clever thing in my life. I shouldn't know how. Everything clever has been written over and over again by people in books."
"Hang books!" he exclaimed. "It's always books with you! I wish we had never found that old chest of musty volumes in the panelled room."
"Do you? Then you are sillier than I thought you were. The books taught me all I know,—about love!"
"About love! You don't know what love means!" he declared, trampling the hay he stood upon with impatience. "You read and read, and you get the queerest ideas into your head, and all the time the world goes on in ways that are quite different from what YOU are thinking about,—and lovers walk through the fields and lanes everywhere near us every year, and you never appear to see them or to envy them—"