“I am absolutely whole-hearted about several things already. What sort of things were you thinking about?”
“Well, take the house first. It meets my ideal, but it mayn’t be yours. You must promise to give an unvarnished opinion.”
“Make your mind easy! If there is one thing that I may claim to be above all others, it is ‘unvarnished’. I have a brutal frankness in expressing my own opinion. If, through nice feeling, I try to disguise it, my manner shrieks it aloud!”
“That’s all right then. I’m glad to hear it. Next comes the question of time. We should have to take a lease of three years. I don’t know if you’d care to bind yourself for so long.”
That reminded me of the aunts’ “until”, and I said solemnly, “Charmion, tell me the worst. Is there an eligible bachelor who owns the next ‘place’ ready to discover me picking his roses, or trespassing on his side of the stream, and to make love to me forthwith? They always do in books, you know, when girls go to live in country houses.”
Charmion smiled her slow, languorous smile.
“I have amused myself with looking up the names of the people living in all the big houses around: They seem uniformly made up of couples. To the best of my belief, there is not a single man, bachelor or widower, within many miles.”
I said, “Oh!” and felt the faint, natural dismay which any human girl would feel in the circumstances. Charmion herself was enough romance for the present, and a precipitate “lover next door” would for the moment have been de trop, but still—
My expression (unvarnished!) evidently betrayed my feelings, for Charmion smiled, sighed, and stretched out a caressing hand.
“Let’s be honest. It is foolish to set up a partnership in the dark. Is there anyone, Evelyn, who may swoop down upon us at a moment’s notice, and carry you off to share his house?”