"Now you've got to behave yourself."
He shuffled from one foot to the other. And he grinned.
"Don't I always behave myself?"
"You've got to behave yourself extra special well, you're in a lady's room." He looked about him, his grin continually expanding. The girl, propping up the mirror which Lizzie had left upon the table against a box, began, by its aid, to fidget with her hat, talking as she did so. "Tom Duffield, you're on your good behaviour; as I might say, you're on appro. If I'm going to be your wife you've got to do something to show that you deserve it, so don't you seem to forget it." The man laughed, for so big a fellow, with curious softness. "It's all very well for you to laugh, but perhaps it is not all so cut and dried as you quite think. You're going to take two ladies out for a holiday to Kew Gardens, Mr Duffield, by the boat, so just you behave to them in a way that'll show you'll do credit to me as a husband." He laughed again. She faced him. "Well, and what might you be laughing at?"
He shuffled with his feet.
"Nothing--at you."
"That's a nice thing to say, upon my word. If you think I'm nothing, or that I'm going to be treated as nothing, you'll soon find that you're mistaken, and so I tell you. Don't stand fidgeting there like a great gawk; go and get some sweets--chocolates--good ones, none of your cheap truck, mind, and some fruit--grapes; Lizzie'll be ready by the time you're back."
The man put on his hat. He went, without a word, to do her bidding, with the obedience and the silence of a well-trained dog. Indeed, on his face, in his eyes, even in his bearing, there was something which was dog-like. The girl stared for a moment at the door through which he had gone.
"He's useful if he's not ornamental."
She returned to the mirror. Not impossibly it suggested to her that exactly the contrary might have been said of herself--she was ornamental if she was not useful. Even stronger than the man's resemblance to a dog was hers to a humming-bird. Like it, she was small; like it, too, she was exquisitely, daintily fashioned, almost too fragile for human nature's daily food. She seemed singularly out of place in that poor, tawdry chamber. Fitted, rather, for a gilded cage, or at least for some shrine of elegance and glitter. Everything about her was in proportion, tiny, and, if she was a little overdressed--if, for instance, in the details of her costume there was too much colour, the accentuation became her peculiarly exotic beauty. Her attitudes, her gestures, her little tricks of movement, all were bird-like; one felt, so free from grossness was her frame, that she scarcely was a thing of earth at all.