Miss Reed, enraptured: “Oh! doesn’t it seem just like—like—inspiration, Nettie?”
Miss Spaulding: “’Sh! Be quiet, do! You’ll frighten them away!”
Grinnidge: “And then what?”
Ransom: “What then? I don’t know what then. But it appears to me that, as a gentleman, I’ve got nothing to do with the result. All that I’ve got to do is to submit to my fate, whatever it is.”
Miss Reed, breathlessly: “What princely courage! What delicate magnanimity! Oh, he needn’t have the least fear! If I could only tell him that!”
Grinnidge, after an interval of meditative smoking: “Yes, I guess that’s the best thing you can do. It will strike her fancy, if she’s an imaginative girl, and she’ll think you a fine fellow.”
Miss Reed: “Oh, the horrid thing!”
Grinnidge: “If you humble yourself to a woman at all, do it thoroughly. If you go halfway down she’ll be tempted to push you the rest of the way. If you flatten out at her feet to begin with, ten to one but she will pick you up.”
Ransom: “Yes, that was my idea.”
Miss Reed: “Oh, was it, indeed! Well!”