He: “No; it was cowardly, it was mean, it was unmanly. I see it now, but I will spend my life in repairing the wrong, if you will only let me.” He impetuously advances some paces toward her, and then stops, arrested by her irresponsive attitude.
She, with a light sigh, and looking down at the paper, which she has continued to hold between her hands: “There was a time—a moment—when I might have answered as you wish.”
He: “Oh! then there will be again. If you have changed once, you may change once more. Let me hope that some time—any time, dearest”—
She, quenching him with a look: “Mr. Ransom, I shall never change toward you! You confess that you had your opportunity, and that you despised it.”
He: “Oh! not despised it!”
She: “Neglected it.”
He: “Not wilfully—no. I confess that I was stupidly, vilely, pusillan—pusillan—illani”—
She: “’Monsly”—
He: “Thanks—’mously unworthy of it; but I didn’t despise it; I didn’t neglect it; and if you will only let me show by a lifetime of devotion how dearly and truly I have loved you from the first moment I drove that cow away”—
She: “Mr. Ransom, I have told you that I should never change toward you. That cow was nothing when weighed in the balance against your being willing to leave a poor girl, whom you supposed interested in you, and to whom you had paid the most marked attention, without a word to show her that you cared for her. What is a cow, or a whole herd of cows, as compared with obliging a young lady to offer you money that you hadn’t earned, and then savagely flinging it back in her face? A yoke of oxen would be nothing—or a mad bull.”