Jack pulled a serious face.
“Look here!” he said. “You mustn’t play too much at that sort of thing! You’ll be getting ‘entangled’ with that selfish old brute, and he’ll wriggle out of everything that could compromise himself. He won’t bother about you. You see I’m an American—”
“Good for you!” she interpolated, smiling.
“Yes, I’m proud of it. But, being one, I shouldn’t allow any woman to do menial things for me. Your Philosopher does allow it. I’ve seen you run from one end of the garden to another to fetch a pipe which the lazy beggar has left lying about somewhere,—or to get him a chair—or find his hat and walking-stick—”
“He’s old,” she said.
“Old be hanged! He’s not decrepit. Does he ever do anything for you? Fetch you a chair? Help you to find anything? Try to give you any pleasure apart from his own dull company? Now, does he?”
She made a little pink bud of her mouth as she replied, meekly—
“I’m afraid he doesn’t! You see—you see he’s so absorbed in thought!”
“I’d absorb him if I had the chance!” said Jack. “Have you ever read George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’?”
“Some of it,” she answered. “I couldn’t get through it all.”