“Oh! of course it’s a splendid thing for both of us,” running on. “I’d have developed into an oddity of some sort, you may be sure, and been a kind of show person of the neighbourhood. Or perhaps I’d never have grown up at all. I’d just have remained a rowdy kid—and fancy a rowdy kid of thirty-five! wouldn’t it be awful! Now I’m going to be a good son—it sounds lovely, doesn’t it? I’m so glad daddy put it that way. Being a good daughter sounds namby-pamby and Sunday-schoolish, but being a good son, when you happen to be a girl, sounds just fine. And then it’s splendid not having to teach, isn’t it? Not that I could, for I don’t know anything; but I might have had to be a nursery governess and worry about after tiresome children. Mixing medicines sounds much more exciting, though, I think, if I might have had my choice of anything, I’d have been one of the keepers at the Zoo. It would be just lovely to be with the animals all day long, and find out all their funny little ways, and make friends of them. But best of all would have been to come to the Argentine with you,” hurrying on without giving him time to speak. “You’ll ride bare-headed over endless grass plains, and have great times with the cattle, and shoot and fish, and have wide-spreading skies all around you still, while I’ll be suffocated among the smuts and chimney-pots. Oh, Jack, Jack!” clinging to him with sudden weakness, “God might have made me a man, mightn’t He? Then I could have come and been a cowboy with you, instead of mixing silly medicines among the smuts and chimney-pots.” Jack put his arm round her, but for a few moments he could not trust himself to speak. “It’ll be all right by and by, Paddy,” he said at last. “You’ll get married, you know, to some awfully nice chap, who’ll take you back to the country again and just spoil you all day long.” She shrank away from him suddenly, almost with an angry gesture. “No, I won’t get married,” she said. “I tell you I won’t—I won’t—I won’t!” Jack looked taken aback. “Why ever not!” he asked. “Because I won’t, that’s why. You’re no better than the other men, Jack—and you’re all a lot of blind owls. You think a girl can’t do without getting married—that just that, and nothing else, is her idea of happiness! Such rubbish—you ought to have more sense.”