“But I can’t and I won’t! I am a bad boy. Just now it is all a beautiful and adventurous dream. I don’t want to see that woman again—ever. It would spoil the romance of it. Go yourself. You can drop down in mid-morning. No one will be in. Leave my card on the table.”
“What stuff, Fred! You can’t get out of it. Mr. Lyndsay wants to see you. He called on you, not on me.”
“But I don’t want to see him. Imagine my having to explain and apologize, and fetch the whole thing down to the dreary level of prose. I am ill; I am dead; I shall go home—anything!”
He was at his high level of reckless enjoyment of a delightful indiscretion, and a part of his delight lay in the distress it occasioned his soberly conventional friend. He was himself, in truth, a graver man than Ellett, but took into his work as a successful engineer the same gaiety which ran riot in his holiday hours. It had its value with the men who did work under his eyes, and helped him and them over some hard places. At need he became instantly a cool, watchful, cautious man, with the bearing and reserve of middle life. To those who saw him only in his utter abandonment of glee, ready as a boy for any merry enterprise, and by no means disliking it the more if it brought physical risks, it was hardly conceivable that he should be, back of all this, a man of strong opinions, political and religious, of definite views, and of an almost fantastic sense of honor.
“Can’t you be decently quiet a moment, and think a little?”
“Don’t want to,” returned Carington. “Git away wid ye! You are like Eve: you want to introduce a knowledge of good and evil into this Eden of mine. Go, fish and let me alone. I want to dream it over: that scene in the wood, the rain, the wild orange, light for a minute, that copper-head saint. It was really great, Oliver! Beats the Bowery Theater! And, oh!—I forgot to tell you. She told her pa I was such a good bowman!—so thoughtful! and couldn’t she have me always? Always, Oliver! The bliss of that!”
“I don’t see how you can see anything amusing in it, Fred. It isn’t as if this was some common New York girl, with a boarding-school civilization. Now that’s a rather neat phrase, ‘a boarding-school civilization.’”
“Is it? What else?”
“Nothing. I only meant to say these Lyndsays are gentlefolk, and won’t be very well pleased.”
“You old idiot! Do you suppose I don’t know that? Put your brains to work. Here am I at the end of the first volume of a lovely romance; situation entirely novel. I wish to stop there; the second and third volumes are sure to fall off dismally. The problem is, how not to go on; or, if I must, how to drop from poetry to prose.”