‘Your good opinion has had time to cool? Pray be frank, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ It was in her mood to quarrel--at least, to reach the brink of a quarrel with him, if ’twere only for sweet relenting’s sake. ‘I don’t one bit come up to your ideal of a model woman?’ ‘I abhor models, irrespective of their sex. Marjorie, why are we talking in this strain?’ And now her fingers reached his lips. ‘I want you to be like nothing, to be nothing, but yourself.’ ‘And I, myself, shall never alter. I may be too dull-witted to pass the entrance examination for Girton. That will be my misfortune. I shall always be athirst for knowing things, for seeing life--on its seamy side, especially--with my own eyes, for getting to the real worst of everything! And I shall always,’ added Marjorie, with a look that indubitably had in it the nature of a challenge, ‘retain my Bartrand temper.’ ‘I have a temper also,’ answered Geff, drawing her a little closer to him. ‘Do not omit that item from our prospects of future joy. You are passionate. I am unforgetting. Stormy elements, these, to be brought into daily, hourly contact under the same roof.’ ‘And has your ideal of life always been one of conflict?’ asked Marjorie. At the domestic picture, quietly touched in by Geoffrey, the lines of her lips had softened against her will. ‘I have had no experience save in conflict,’ answered Geff Arbuthnot, truthfully. ‘When you were a really young man, four or five years ago, did you look forward to the Taming of a Shrew as a likely sequel to your term of happy bachelorhood?’ The question was jestingly meant, lightly spoken. But Geoffrey’s dark cheek reddened. ‘Oh, if I have said anything indiscreet, forgive me.’ Marjorie watched him with attention. ‘You must grow used, remember, to the faults of my fine qualities. One of these is inquisitiveness. It would delight me to know, precisely, what you used to think and feel when you were twenty years old. I suppose you were not so preternaturally wise, always, as you are now?’ ‘I have never been wise at any period of my life,’ said Geoffrey Arbuthnot. ‘But when you were nineteen, say, what did you think, what did you hope, what did you look forward to?’ ‘What I hoped, what I looked forward to, was--madness.’ The unguarded answer broke from him instantly. ‘If you would be kind to me, Marjorie,’ he added, ‘let the past rest. There is enough, a great deal more than enough, to be grateful for in the present.’ Marjorie, on this, drew herself to her full height. She looked at him with the instinct of a child who would unriddle a secret by his own close reading of another’s face. She freed her hands abruptly from his clasp. ‘What you hoped, what you looked forward to was--madness! Do you mean in regard of University laurels?’ ‘We are not talking of University laurels. We are talking,’ said Geff, honestly, ‘of the happiness beyond happiness, the companionship for life of two human souls that suit each other.’