"Perfectly. I could only picture it as meaning more of trouble and unrest. But things change, dear. We change. There has taken place in me since that, no matter for what reason, an increase of self-confidence and confidence in fate such as turns men into nuisances or makes them successful. In the last twenty-four hours particularly. Now, as I look at the inconvenience of getting tangled up again with caring for a person, I find I don't mean at all to suffer. I mean to bother you until you say yes, and then to be happy. You could never wilfully torment me, I know; you are incapable of it. Then, when you have graciously consented to marry me, I feel as if I might build up my life on new lines." "I can't, Geraldino; I can't." "You can't. So you have said. And I have asked you to tell me your reasons, that I may combat them one by one." "It's no use. We're too different." "That we are different, thank God! is a reason for and not against." "No, no; not when it's such a huge difference. We're like--a bird and a fish." "Don't call me a fish. I object." "We don't think the same about hardly anything." "But we feel alike on everything of importance." "There's hardly a thing I do that's quite right as you see it. No, don't take the trouble to contradict me; let me do the talking for a minute. You're so critical and so conventional and so correct! No matter how much you say you aren't, you _are_. And while we're like this I don't have to care. I rather enjoy shocking you. And while I'm none of your business, you don't have to care what I do or what I'm like. We can have our fun and be awfully fond of each other, and it's all serene and right. But if I were Mrs. Gerald Fane, all my faults and shortcomings, my not knowing the things that everybody in your society knows, my not having any elegant accomplishments, would show up so glaring that I should know you must be mortified. You couldn't help it." "Stop, dear! You enrage me. You put me beside myself. You are so superficial. And dense. And you hold me up to myself in the features of a beastly cad! I won't have it. For one thing, let me tell you that if I were the Lord Ronald Macdonald of that song we've heard Miss Felixson sing, and you were that canny lass Leezie Lindsay, I should know jolly well that after I'd carried you off to the Hielands my bride and my darling to be, it would be a very short time before Lady Ronald Macdonald had all the airs and tricks of speech of my sisters and cousins. That, however, is neither here nor there. Who wants you to be different? Aurora, if you only knew yourself! Ceres, or Summer, or Peace sitting among the wheat-sheaves, what would it matter that she had not been educated at a fashionable boarding-school? Let her just breathe and be,--beautiful, benign, and any man not utterly a fool will prefer to lie at her knees, keeping still while her silence appeases and reconciles him, to hearing the most brilliant conversation of a lady novelist."