“Well, what do you say, Missie?”
“It then depends upon how they are offered.”
“Not wildly, and yet not careless-like; not purposely, and yet not by chance; not too quick nor yet too slow.”
“How then?” said Fancy.
“Coolly and practically,” he said. “How would that kind of love be taken?”
“Not anxiously, and yet not indifferently; neither blushing nor pale; nor religiously nor yet quite wickedly.”
“Well, how?”
“Not at all.”
Geoffrey Day’s storehouse at the back of his dwelling was hung with bunches of dried horehound, mint, and sage; brown-paper bags of thyme and lavender; and long ropes of clean onions. On shelves were spread large red and yellow apples, and choice selections of early potatoes for seed next year;—vulgar crowds of commoner kind lying beneath in heaps. A few empty beehives were clustered around a nail in one corner, under which stood two or three barrels of new cider of the first crop, each bubbling and squirting forth from the yet open bunghole.
Fancy was now kneeling beside the two inverted hives, one of which rested against her lap, for convenience in operating upon the contents. She thrust her sleeves above her elbows, and inserted her small pink hand edgewise between each white lobe of honeycomb, performing the act so adroitly and gently as not to unseal a single cell. Then cracking the piece off at the crown of the hive by a slight backward and forward movement, she lifted each portion as it was loosened into a large blue platter, placed on a bench at her side.