“I insist.”
“You insist?” I replied, in the tone of one speaking to a naughty child. “How old are you, Miss Dixon?”
She laughed.
“I think I am a good deal older than you, Rollo, in this respect; I don’t keep letters as I did when I was a sentimental schoolgirl. I destroy that kind.” And she nodded towards the bundle.
“Indeed?” I said. “And why did you not tell me sooner? That would have been valuable information to me at one time.”
“And why?”
“I might have written a good deal more than I did.”
“You never wrote anything unfitted for my sheltered youth,” she replied, quietly smiling, and burrowing one foot deeper into the cavernous recesses of a slipper.
“I don’t post all I write,” I corrected, “but I have written things that would have amazed a Bassishaw—and thought twice about it.”
“Bassishaw doesn’t say much in his letters,” she said musingly. She and Caroline were very good friends, and there had doubtless been a good deal of inter-feminine confidence between them.