"My ideas are boundless," he said. "I spurn space on the day I call you my own. You were meant to mirror the Mediterranean in those wonderful eyes of yours, and you shall. We'll sail away to the land of wine and song--to Provence, the cradle of the troubadours. It can be done now that we are friends with the French again. Yes; and I'm going also to take you to Italy; I----" "At the beginning of the hunting season? How ridiculous you are, Peter. Why, even if I married you--which you know I never shall--I would not----" "Grace, you must marry me. It is an accomplished fact. The banns have been read for the first time of asking at Widecombe and at Chagford. Nobody forbade 'em. You are absolutely vital to my peace of mind, to my well-being, to my sanity. You may not love me yet, but soon enough you'll look back to these wayward days and mourn 'em." "Indeed I shall." "Mourn 'em, that you could so often have made so true a man sad. You won't understand me." "Yes, I do--perfectly. If there is one thing about our dreadful relations that I do see clearly, it is your nature. You have been peculiarly and horribly clear of late. You want me--what you call 'me'--my curls, eyes, lips, and all the rest of a wretched girl. But you don't care a feather for the part of me that matters. You never consider that I've got a soul, and that it's always sad and sick and sorry when it thinks of you. You don't mind that you're killing all my higher senses and instincts--poisoning them; you----" "Now, my dear Grace, these assumptions are nonsense, and show first how little you really know about me, and, secondly, how absurdly scant attention you pay to my conversation. It is a union of souls that I sigh for and shall assuredly establish when the time comes. "'Tell me not of your starrie eyes, Your lips that seem on roses fed, Your breasts, where Cupid tumbling lies Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed--' George Darley--a pretty boy-poet who has not published yet." "Really, Peter, you're impossible!" "I say tell me not of these things, Grace, because they are nothing whatever to me. I don't want to hear about 'em. Soul to soul--that's all I ask; and that is what I will have." "Never! It takes two people to be married, and they've got to be of the same mind." "Happily you are mistaken in that last assertion. Your idea is that one lover may take a maid to church, but the Bench of Bishops can't make her his wife if she's averse. Tut, tut! What a violent thought! We'll find ourselves of one mind yet. Greater things than matrimony have happened in less time than lies before us." "Plain English is wasted upon you, Peter Norcot, and upon my father too."