‘Indeed I did not! Do you imagine you are the only nice man I have ever seen--that I have been shut up on this island like poor Miranda and never met a man before? What a simpleton you must be! Of course I was engaged to him, and should have been married to him by this time, only the poor dear had no certain income, and papa would not hear of it! And I cried for weeks afterwards whenever I heard his name mentioned. Would you have had me an insensible block, and not care whether we had to give each other up or no?’ ‘No, no, of course not, but it is terrible to me, Nora, to think you could have cared for another man.’ ‘Rubbish!’ cried the young lady. ‘How many women have you cared for yourself? Come now, let us have the list?’ The earl blushed uneasily. ‘I have told you already,’ he replied, ‘that you are the first woman I have ever asked to be the Countess of Ilfracombe!’ ‘And I didn’t ask you how many women you had proposed to, but how many you had thought you loved. The list can’t be so long that you have forgotten them all? Let’s begin at the end. That will make it easier. Who was the last woman before me?’ ‘That is a very silly question, Nora, and I consider that I have already answered it. Besides, I am not a young lady, and that makes all the difference.’ ‘In your idea, Ilfracombe, perhaps, but not mine. We women see no difference in the two things at all. And if you cannot produce a clean bill of health in the matter of having loved before, you have no right to expect it of me. Besides, my dear boy,’ she continued in a more soothing voice, ‘do you mean to tell me, in this nineteenth century, that you have reached your present age--what is your present age, Ilfracombe, nine-and-twenty, is it not?--without having made love to heaps of women? Not that I care one jot! I am not such a zany! I think it’s all for the best since “pot will not be able to call kettle black,” eh?’