"Ah, that's the trouble. You weren't thinking of me. Of course, I oughtn't to have cared for those little boys," (some of them were inches taller than he) "but I couldn't help it. I kept saying inside, 'This is a foretaste of what I've got to suffer when she's staying with Katherine at The Moorings.' I don't know when I've been so unpopular with myself. I don't see how I'm going to get along unless you'll be nice to me; right now." "I am nice to you," I said. "As nice as I know how to be." "I could teach you to be a lot nicer. Say, Lady Betty, let me, won't you?" His eyes, though they are such a pale blue, had that silly, melting look in them that my cousin Loveland's have when he talks to me. "Let you do what?" I asked, almost snappishly, for a person sitting in such a lovely place. "Teach you to like me. I fell all over myself in love with you the first minute I saw you." "Day before yesterday!" I exclaimed. "What nonsense. You're poking fun at me. I don't believe in love at first sight--at least, I don't think I do. Anyhow, nobody could fall in love with _me_ in that way." "Couldn't they, though? That's all you know about it, then. All Americans will fall in love with you like that, and it's just what I want to guard against. I want you to be engaged to me before you go to Newport. Then I shall feel kind of safe." "Dear me, are you really proposing, and it isn't in joke?" I asked. "I do wish you wouldn't." "Would I propose to Lady Betty Bulkeley in joke?" he reproached me. "The idea of proposing to any girl when you've only seen her three times!" "What did I tell you about my friend in San Francisco? I was working slowly up to this, even then." "_Slowly!_" "Yes, very slowly. I think I've shown a great deal of patience. American girls--the beauties, I mean--are quite hurt if a fellow doesn't propose somewhere along in the first day or two. They think he can't appreciate their real worth, and that he deserves what he gets if some other chap walks away with them. Now, I'm not going to sit still on my perch and see anything else walking off with you." I couldn't help laughing. "I'll call for help if I think there's any danger," said I; "but I can't promise more than that. I didn't come over to America to pick up a husband." He looked at me rather queerly when I said that, almost as if he thought I had come for that express purpose, and was trying to conceal it. But, of course, he couldn't be so horrid as to suppose such a thing really, and I must have imagined the strange expression. If he only knew, I came away so that another girl might be sure to get a husband, and I'm not allowed to go back until he has been got.