He withdrew his hand from hers, and a shadow darkened his features.
“You see,” she went on, in gentle coaxing accents, “when you first came here to help Dad, you were charming!—yes, perfectly charming! And I took you for walks to all the pretty places about here, and we got on so well together that I used to say to myself, what an honour it would be if such a brilliant man were to care enough for me to marry me! Yes, I really did! But when, little by little, you dropped the ‘company manners’ as children say, and showed me another side altogether, I felt then that you were too brilliant!—too clever to be always kind to a silly little woman like myself whose ‘sentiment’ always outruns her brains. And I—I think”—her voice sank softly—“that in marriage kindliness is better than cleverness.”
He did not speak. She ventured to touch his hand in a caressing way as a child might do.
“I like you very much still!” she said. “I don’t mind your sarcasm as much as I did—and when you say rough things I try to forget them. But if I were married to you I don’t think I could forget them! They would hurt! And when you are sarcastic you can be very rude! Yes, indeed! And I would not be able to stand that either! Because, as you have often said, I ‘overdo the sentiment,’ and if I loved you, and you were unkind, I should be utterly miserable! So what a fortunate thing it is that I don’t love you and wouldn’t marry you for all the world!—and that I just ‘like’ you, and admire you as a very, very clever man! For so we can always be the best of friends!”
“Cold comfort, applied with sweet eloquence!” said the Philosopher, rousing himself from his momentary abstraction. “I understand! And you may be right! My experience of men and things has not mellowed my disposition—I have grown a crust upon myself, and honestly, I enjoy my own crustiness. But you, dear child!—if you only made more allowance for this, you would find it is all on the surface, and only on the surface. Now you have been perfectly frank with me up to a certain point,—why do you not declare at once honestly the real obstacle that prevents your marrying me? Why?”
She was silent. Her head drooped, and he stroked her bright hair.
“Why?” he repeated, in a tone of bland argument. “I don’t think I should make a bad husband, I should have my ‘moods’ undoubtedly—and I should expect them to be humoured and tolerated. And you—you would most certainly mount your ‘high horse’ occasionally, and I should permit you to prance upon it like a child on rockers till you were tired. You would soon be tired, and so should I! But I would take every care of you—I am old enough to fill your father’s place should he be taken from you, and I could give you a position in cultured society—not the society of American millionaires, but the society of art and letters. And I would promise not to be ‘rude’ or ‘sarcastic’ more than I could possibly help—”
She rose from her pretty appealing attitude at his knee, and smiling, shook her head at him regretfully.
“Ah, you would never be able to help it!” she said. “It is your nature! I should have fallen in love with you if it hadn’t been!”
Goaded to retort by her tone, and more or less vexed at the airy aloofness of her figure as she stood upright now and a little apart from him, he said: