“You know I am not so conceited as that! No,” she continued ingenuously, “I feared that if I accepted him it would look, over here, as if the home-supply of husbands were of inferior quality; and then we had such disagreeable discussions at the beginning, I simply could not bear to leave my nice new free country, and ally myself with his aeons of tiresome history. But it came to me in the night, a week ago, that after all I should hate a man who didn't love his Fatherland; and in the illumination of that new idea Ronald's character assumed a different outline in my mind. How could he love America when he had never seen it? How could I convince him that American women are the most charming in the world in any better way than by letting him live under the same roof with a good example? How could I expect him to let me love my country best unless I permitted him to love his best?” “You needn't offer so many apologies for your infatuation, my dear,” I answered dryly. “I am not apologising for it!” she exclaimed impulsively. “Oh, if you could only keep it to yourself, I should like to tell you how I trust and admire and reverence Ronald Macdonald, but of course you will repeat everything to Willie Beresford within the hour! You think he has gone on and on loving me against his better judgment. You believe he has fought against it because of my unfitness, but that I, poor, weak, trivial thing, am not capable of deep feeling and that I shall never appreciate the sacrifices he makes in choosing me! Very well, then, I tell you plainly that if I had to live in a damp manse the rest of my life, drink tea and eat scones for breakfast, and--and buy my hats of the Inchcaldy milliner, I should still glory in the possibility of being Ronald Macdonald's wife--a possibility hourly growing more uncertain, I am sorry to say!” “And the extreme aversion with which you began,” I asked--“what has become of that, and when did it begin to turn in the opposite direction?”