“Ted. Will you give me an answer to a serious inquiry?”
“Sure. Any old answer. What’s your problem?”
“I’m not kidding. Do you think it’s inevitably, in any case, a mistake for a fourteen-year-old girl to be engaged?” He concealed his grin by great attention to the grass. “Is she deeply in love?”
“Very,” said Nora in a deeply-in-love tone.
“Well”—he rose on his knees, thought somberly—His the boy able to support her?”
“He will be someday. He’s extremely intellectual. He intends to become an anthropologist.”
“Be all right,” he said, nodding in self-agreement. “That is, if the girl’s going to have a child.”
“Oh! You meanie! You evil thing!”
“If they’re going to have a child,” he asserted in an offended tone, “I really think they owe it to the little stranger to marry.”
“There are times,” Nora said, “when you ought to be afraid the earth would open and swallow you up! I’m talking about the sacred kind of love, not the profane kind!”