“But Eliza—that’s the young lady I was a-telling you about—ain’t quite my fancy. And if so be as you haven’t got a young man just at present, or if you was a-feeling a bit off colour with the one you have got, why, I’d be proud and happy to fill the situation. I’m getting good money—five-and-twenty bob a week without perks”—I suppose he meant perquisites—“besides money in the bank, and a few sticks towards a home, including a drawing-room settee in sky-blue satin what I got from a friend of mine whose wife hooked off with another bloke. You just tell me your night out, and I’ll be there on time, you bet your hat—and a beauty it is, regular market-garden I call it—and if we don’t fix the day before we part, it won’t be no fault of mine. I mean business, I do, straight.”
Anything like that person’s volubility I never encountered. I could not stop him. I seldom am ready of speech, and before that baker’s boy I felt tongue-tied. Not the least amazing part of it was that he seemed a mere lad of, at the outside, eighteen years, with a fresh complexion, and, I should have said, a babe for innocence. It shows how deceptive appearances are. At last I could get a word in edgeways, and I got it.
“I think you are mistaken.”
But he cut me short.
“Not much, I’m not. I’m not that sort of chap. Never make mistakes, I don’t—at least, not of that kind. I know when I like a girl as well as any man; and I tell you, honest, that I never was so gone on a young lady as I am on you.”
“I still think you are mistaken, because I happen to be one of the five scratch-catting young women you alluded to. I am Miss Norah O’Brady.”
Some baker’s boys would have been abashed, but he was not. He retained his presence of mind in a fashion I could not have equalled. And, really, for a person in his position, he was not bad-looking.
“Lor’, now, if I didn’t think you was a real lady! You’d have been took for a real lady by almost anyone. You look it—every inch. A regular queen you look. You’ll excuse me, miss, for seeming to make so free; but, however humble a man may be, he’s still a man.”
“Please give me the bread.”
He began cramming loaves and things in paper bags into my arms in a manner which I found embarrassing, talking all the time.