“I’m thinking you’re going too fast, Mr. Selby,” said Joan. The laughing spirit was exorcised. She no longer felt any inclination to burst forth into that _fou rire_ which comes at the most inappropriate moments. He had sobered her by his own perfect sobriety. Joan felt that this was a grave business affair, and not a frivolous piece of nonsense inappropriate to her serious years. Some lingering wish, perhaps, to hear a real love tale in her own person had been lurking in her mind along with the certainty that she would laugh at it if it were told. And many ludicrous pictures had come before her when she first espied Mr. Selby’s “intentions.” She had wondered, with a comical mixture of inexperienced faith and cynicism, whether he would go down on his knees and call her by all sorts of endearing names. She was bursting with laughter at the sentimental personage who intended to make a divinity of Joan Joscelyn. Nevertheless, perhaps, she was a little conscious, secretly and underneath all, though she never acknowledged it to herself, that this was the way in which a woman had a right to be addressed once in her life--Joan Joscelyn as well as another. But that was a very great secret, and deep down; so deep that she had never confessed it even to herself. And now she was out in all her calculations, and there was nothing sentimental to laugh at. It was a very sensible sort of bargain that was proposed to her, and she did not know where to find a word against it. Her laugh came to an entire end. “I’m thinking,” she said, “that you’re going too fast.”
“It lies with you to say that,” said Selby; “but, Joan, remember” (he had given up the Miss, and she perceived it), “that what I am saying I’m ready to do, and it’s only for you to say the word. I’ve thought of it since ever I saw you. ‘That’s the woman for me,’ I said, and you know how we agreed about the colt. We agree, too, about the place. I went to look at it because you said you would like it, and I like it, too. And we’re both partial to the same kind of life. If we couldn’t get on together I don’t know who should. And in everything else I’ll do whatever you please.”
“You miss out one thing, Mr. Selby,” said Joan, “we ought to be partial to each other as well as to the kind of life.”