IV
By a peculiar coincidence, at twelve o’clock the following day, I happened to be sitting on the same wall at the same spot. Peter said at luncheon it was a queer thing that some people never could manage to be on time for their meals.
I fancy we can all form a tolerably accurate idea of what took place during the next day or so.
It is scarcely necessary to retail our conversations. We gossiped of simple things. We talked very little; and, when we did talk, the most ambitiously preambled sentences were apt to result in nothing more prodigious than a wave of the hand, and a pause, and, not infrequently, a heightened complexion. Altogether, then, it was not oppressively wise or witty talk, but it was eminently satisfactory to its makers.
As when, on the third morning, I wished to sit by Margaret on the bench, and she declined to invite me to descend from the wall.
“On the whole,” said she, “I prefer you where you are; like all picturesque ruins, you are most admirable at a little distance.”
“Ruins!”—and, indeed, I was not yet twenty-six—“I am a comparatively young man.”
As a concession, “In consideration of your past, you are tolerably well preserved.”
“—and I am not a new brand of marmalade, either.”
“No, for that comes in glass jars; whereas, Mr. Townsend, I have heard, is more apt to figure in family ones.”
“A pun, Miss Beechinor, is the base coinage of conversation tendered only by the mentally dishonest.”
“—Besides, one can never have enough of marmalade.”
“I trust they give you a sufficiency of it in the nursery?”
“Dear me, you have no idea how admirably that paternal tone sits upon you! You would make an excellent father, Mr. Townsend. You really ought to adopt someone. I wish you would adopt me, Mr. Townsend.”
I said I had other plans for her. Discreetly, she forbore to ask what they were.