"I hope I won't fall into the water," he observed disarmingly. "I may if you speak to me too severely. See here, Melisande, why did you go and be all engaged to the worthy Dr. Hewitt? You had four or five good years of fun ahead of you if you hadn't." "I mustn't listen to you, if you talk that way," Joy told him quietly. "Oh, you'd better," said Clarence with placidity. "I'm very interesting." "You're very vain," Joy told him, laughing at him in spite of herself. "I am, indeed--it's one of my charms," explained he. "Now that's out of the way, we'll go on talking." "Well, go on talking!" Joy answered him childishly, putting her hands over her ears. "I can go on not listening!" Clarence accordingly did, while Joy kept her hands over her ears till her arms were tired and Clarence apparently had no more to say. Then she dropped them. "I was reciting the Westminster catechism," Clarence observed blandly. "I never waste my gems of conversation on deaf ears. Come, Joy of my life, unbend a little. I don't mean a bit of harm in the world. All I want is a kind word or two and the pleasure of your society." Joy looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, and then laughed. "If you were a poet, here is where you would tell me that the fetters of wearying and sordid marriage were not for you--that they wore on your genius," she said unexpectedly. Clarence gasped. It must have been very much like having the kitten suddenly turn and offer him rational conversation. "_Et tu_, Laetitia!" he said in a neat and scholarly manner. "Joy, you have cruelly deceived me--I thought you were a simple child of nature." "I don't know a bit what I am," she answered truthfully, "but the poets at Grandfather's did talk that way--not to me, but to other people--and you sounded like them. You aren't really a poet, are you?" "Well, I've never been overt about it," he evaded. He did not know what to make of Joy, any more than ever. Joy, trailing the end of a braid absently in the water, thought a minute longer, then looked up at him. "It seems to me," she said suddenly, "that you just mock and mock at things all the time. I'm not clever, and I can't answer you cleverly. You might as well make up your mind to it, and then the way I look won't be a disappointment to you. I know I look like a medieval princess. It's because I was brought up to. But I'm not the least bit medieval inside; honestly I'm not. I love to cook and I love children, and I'm always hungry for my meals. I don't want to seem discouraging, but I shall really be a dreadful disappointment to you if you--" "As long as you have copper-gold hair and sky-blue eyes, _nothing_ you can do will disappoint me," said Clarence caressingly. "Be a suffragette, if you will--be a war-widow! It's all the same. I can be just as happy with you--and I intend to be!"