I looked upon her whitened face in ever-rising passion:
"I tell you," said I, "that the backwoods aristocracy is the better and safer caste, for the other is rotten under red coat or blue; and a ring-tailed cap doffed by a gnarled hand is worth all your laced cocked hats bound around with gold and trailed in the dust with fine, smooth fingers!"
Sure I was in a proper phrensy now, nor dreamed myself a target for the high gods' laughter, where I vapoured and strode and shouted aloud my moral jeremiad.
"So," said I, "you shall have Summer House; and shall, as you sit a-knitting, make your choice of honest suitors at your ease and not be waylaid and hunted and used without ceremony by the first young hot-head who entraps you in the starlight! No! Nor be the quarry of older villains and subtler with persuasion. No!
"For today Penelope Grant, spinster, is a burgesse of Johnstown, and is a person both respectable and taxed. And any man who would court her must conduct suitably and in a customary manner, nor, like a wild falcon, circle over head awaiting the opportunity to strike.
"No! All that sport—all that gay laxity and folly is at an end. And here's the damned deed that ends it!" I added, thrusting the parchment into her hands.
She seemed white and frightened. And, "Oh, Lord!" she breathed, "have I, then, conducted so shamelessly? And did I so wholly lose your favour when you kissed me?"
I had not meant that, and I winced and grew hot in the cheeks.
"I am not a loose woman," she said in her soft, bewildered way. "Unless it be a fault that I find men somewhat to my liking, and their gay manners pleasure me and divert me."
I said: "You have a way with men. None is insensible to your youth and beauty."