“That depends on what you mean by the old-fashioned home. I had one, and it could well be spared. There were all kinds of homes in old times and the Middle Ages and nowadays, and there’ll be all kinds forever. But we’re wrangling 176 like a pair of lovers instead of getting along beautifully like a pair of casual acquaintances.”
“Aren’t we going to be more than that?”
“I hope not. I want a place on your pay-roll; I’m not asking for a job as your wife.”
“You can have it.”
“Thanks, but I have another engagement. When I have made my way in the world and can support you in the style you’re accustomed to, I may come and ask for your hand.”
Her flippancy irked him worse than her appalling ideas, but she grew more desirable as she grew more infuriating, for the love-game has some resemblances to the fascinating-sickening game of golf. She did not often argue abstrusely, and she was already fagged out mentally. She broke off the debate.
“Now let’s think of something else, if you don’t mind.”
They talked of everything else, but his soul was chiefly engaged in alternating vows to give her up and vows to make her his own in spite of herself; and he kept on trying to guess the conundrum she posed him in refusing to enlighten him as to those unmentionable years between his first sight of her and his second.
In making love, as in other popular forms of fiction, the element of mystery is an invaluable adjunct to the property value. He was still pondering her and wondering what she was pondering when they reached the town where his shipyard lay.