"And yet," he added, with a tardy sense of justice, "Stirling's in some ways an understanding man. I never thought he'd have made allowance for old Betty Hesketh having the wood mania and breaking up his new fence, but he did. Such a fuss as Bartlet kicked up when he caught her at his wood-stack! Of course he caught her at it. Old folks can't help it. They get wood mania when they're childish, if they've known the pinch of cold for too many years. And even if their sheds are full of wood—Betty has enough to last her lifetime—they'll go on picking and stealing. If they see it, they've got to have it. Only it isn't stealing. Mr. Stirling understood that. He said he'd known old ladies the same about china. But the people in his books!" Roger shook his head.
"Didn't you like Jack and Hester in The Magnet! I got so fond of them."
"I don't remember much about them. I dare say I should have liked them if I had felt they were real, but I never did. It's always the same in novels. When I start reading them I know beforehand everybody will talk so uncommonly well—not like——"
"You and me," suggested Annette.
"Well, not like me, anyhow. And not like Janey and the kind of people I know—except perhaps Black. He can say a lot."
"I have felt that too," said Annette, "especially when the hero and heroine are talking. I think how splendidly they both do it, but I secretly feel all the time that if I had been in the heroine's place I never could have expressed myself so well, and behaved so exactly right, and understood everything so quickly. I know I should have been silent and stupid, and only seen what was the right thing to say several hours later, when I had gone home."
Roger looked obliquely at her with an approving eye. Here indeed was a kindred soul!
"In The Magnet," he said, with a sudden confiding impulse, "the men do propose so well. Now in real life they don't. Poor beggars, they'd like to, but they can't. Most difficult thing, but you'd never guess it from The Magnet. Just look at Jack!—wasn't that his name?—how he reels it all out! Shows how much he cares. Says a lot of really good things—not copy-book, I will say that for him. Puts it uncommonly well about not being good enough for her, just as Mr. Stirling would himself if he were proposing. That's what I felt when I read it. Jack never would have had the nerve to say all that, but of course a clever chap like Mr. Stirling, sitting comfortably in his study, with lots of time and no woman to flurry him, could make it up."
Annette did not answer. Perhaps she did not want to flurry him.