'That you wouldn't drive to the railway-station and set off for Strathhaye--alone.'
'Well, that's flat. I often wonder what makes me so ridiculously soft about you, Stella. You say such horrid things to me, while every other girl I come across----'
'Now, Ted, if you boast, your very last fragment of a chance is gone.'
'Oh, I have got a fragment of a chance, then? Come, that's the best thing you've said yet. Look here, Stella, have you ever been in love? Now, honour bright?'
'Well, hardly--except with people in books.'
'But how the deuce could you be in love with people in books?'
'Oh, I assure you they are far the nicest people to fall in love with.'
'Because you can put them on a shelf and leave them there.'
'Yes, that is one great charm. It is partly what ruins life, the way people see so much of each other, till they know each other by heart, up and down--all their stories that once were funny, their pet theories, their stupid idiosyncrasies----'
'Let me see. It is your idiosyncrasy to wish to marry; it is mine to think it too dangerous an experiment.'
'Fancy calling it an idiosyncrasy when a fellow is spoony. But I expect that is not the dictionary meaning. Well, you are all but twenty-three, and you have not been in love. You may depend, if you are not heels over head before you are twenty, you never will be. So you may as well save waiting any longer.'
'Well, Ted, you are the first I have heard use inability to love as an argument for getting married. You are really very humble.'
'Oh! a fellow is always very humble when he's up to the hilt in love.'
'It is afterwards, when the fair is over, that he isn't quite so meek and beseeching.'
'Well, you wouldn't have him be a humble jackass at a distance all through? It's too much like making your dinner off peaches. Besides, a girl like you always has her own way, hand over fist, single or married; and when to that you add ever so many thousands a year----'
'Always when you have been to Melbourne you harp more and more on your money.'
'Maybe. You see, the more you see of the world the more you find how much people think of money, and how much it gets for you.'
'And yet to be poor in the midst of riches is the worst kind of poverty.'