But Florian, for his part, was provokingly cool. “All A is A,” he said, calmly, with irresistible logic—“and every cow-girl’s a cow-girl. I’ll call her a boutrophista, or a neat-herding Phyllis, if it gives you any pleasure. That’s neither here nor there. The point’s just this—You mean the girl no harm: then what the deuce _do_ you mean? Are you going to marry her?” “No; certainly not,” Will answered. She was a very nice girl, and he loved to talk with her—there was something so sweetly unsophisticated in her ways that she charmed and attracted him. But marry her? No; the very word surprised him; he had never even dreamt of it. In the first place (though as yet he hadn’t as much as thought about that), he had nothing to marry upon. And in the second place, if he had, could he take a Tyrolese milkmaid fresh from the cowsheds in his tow to London, and present her to his friends as Mrs Will Deverill? “Then what the deuce _do_ you mean?” Florian repeated, persistently. His sound common-sense, when he chose to let it loose from his veneer of affectation, was no mean commodity. Thus driven to bay, Will was forced to reply with a somewhat sheepish air, “I don’t know that I mean anything. I’ve never tried to formulate my state of mind to myself. She’s a very nice girl . . . for her class and sort . . . and I like to talk to her.” “And when you talk to her, you like to hold her hand and lean forward like this, and stare with all your eyes, and look for all the world as if you wanted to devour her! Oh yes; I’ve seen you. No, no, Will, it won’t do; I’ve been there myself, and I know all about it. Looking at the matter impartially, as a man of the world”—and Florian, drawing himself up, assumed automatically, as those words rolled out, his most magisterial attitude—“what I’m really afraid of is that you’ll get gradually dragged into this rustic syren’s vortex, and be swallowed up before you know it in the treacherous sea of matrimony. However, _you_ don’t believe that, and I know enough of the world to know very well it’s no use, therefore, arguing out that aspect of the case with you. No fellow will ever believe _he_ can be such a fool—till he catches himself in church face to face at last with the awful reality. I prefer, accordingly, to go on the other tack with you. If you don’t mean to marry the girl, then, whether you know it or not, you mean no good to her. I dare say you’ve got all sorts of conventional notions in your head—which, thank heaven, I don’t share—about honour and so forth . . . how a cow-girl’s virtue—I beg your pardon, a boutrophista’s, or a neat-herding Phyllis’s—is as sacred at your hands as the eldest daughter’s of a hundred marquises. But that’s neither here nor there. If you don’t _marry_ the girl, and you don’t _ruin_ the girl, there’s only one thing left possible—you must break the girl’s heart for her. Between ourselves, being, I flatter myself, a tolerable psychologist, I