Page:Comin' Thro' the Rye (1898).djvu/280

272 always like to marry a stupid woman, for she never finds you out!"

"You are wrong," says Paul. "A stupid woman, i.e., a fool, admires everything, and everybody, her husband among the rest; a sensible woman looks all about her, and seeing nothing half as good as the man she has married, admires him."

"A most delicate flattery; but supposing he is not wise?"

"Would a woman of sense marry a man who had none?"

"She often does. Now Mrs. Skipworth, at Silverbridge, she is sensible, and she married a very prosy, foolish man. And yet," I add, looking out at the cool green shadows and gold patches of sunlight that lie athwart the woodland, "I don't know that he is so foolish as irritating. Did you ever know a man who smiles when he tells you the day is fine, smiles when he tells you your soul is lost, and would smile over your new-made grave, and say the funeral had gone off beautifully? That is Mr. Skipworth."

"Well," says Paul, "I shall see him before long, and listen to his sermons, which I suppose will be rather worse than himself. Is your seat in church anywhere near mine?"

"Oh, no! The Towers turns up its nose at the Manor House, and while you rejoice in a curtained pew under the pulpit, we occupy an abased position in the aisle! The pew opposite yours was ours once, but it would not hold us all, and papa exchanged it for a big one; but there is scarcely any one to sit in it now—there are only nine of us, babies and all!"

"Only nine!" he says. Well, I shall come over to the Manor House often, and you will"

"Nell, Nell! cries Milly's voice in the distance, and I jump up hastily. Everybody has left off sleeping, talking, laughing, and flirting; the men are repossessing themselves of their guns, and the ladies are standing about.

"At any rate," says Paul, "we have stolen two pleasant hours from that old thief, Time, have we not?"