"I am in no hurry," he laughingly replied. "I have just been unpacking something far more precious to me."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself," returned she, suddenly assuming a colder tone (she had been saying thou). "You do not deserve that people should be planning how to give you pleasure. I--if a mother had sent me such a Christmas box from a distance--give it me--I will undo the string."
She hastily began cutting open the cover with a little knife of hers, and he gazed in carefully suppressed emotion at every movement of her exquisite hands.
"Lottka," said he; "if you and I were both together in America, and this box had come over the sea--"
She shook her head. "No box would have come then."
"And why not, Lottka? If my mother knew thee as I know thee, dost thou suppose she would hold thee guilty for circumstances over which thou art powerless. Naturally she has her prejudices--like all good mothers. But I know that she loves me more than any of her prejudices."
The girl left off her unpacking, and with her little knife cut all sorts of patterns on the lid of the box.
"Do you call that a prejudice?" said she, without looking at him. "Could you eat an apple that you had found lying in the dirt of the streets? You might wash it ten times over, the repugnance would be all the same. And who knows what foot might have trodden on it, who knows that some slime might not have penetrated the rind, even though it should still be sound at the core? No, no, no! It is so once for all, bad enough that so it should be--but it must not be made even worse."
He wound his arm about her, but rather like a brother than one passionately in love. "Lottka," he said, "it is impossible that this can go on. You cannot waste your life in unavailing regrets." He stopped short--he could not find words that expressed his meaning without fearing to pain her.
"In regrets," she repeated, looking at him firmly and sorrowfully. "Oh no! Who is thinking of it? I have already told you that you may be quite easy about my future. I am provided for. I am not so forsaken as I appear, provided my courage does not desert me--my courage and my disgust. And why must every one be married? If I chose I might be so, and very well too. All possible pains have been taken to make me fall in love, and I have had a choice of very desirable wooers, rich, young, and handsome, and some were really willing regularly to marry me in a regular church, with a regular clergyman in gown and bands. There was only one hitch."