Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/228

 *est or the meanest; this moment, though, a very beggar defied my imperious command. Nor would he budge from his perverseness. Pretty soon his intolerable behaviour made my anger rise. It was increased when I remembered his utter dependence and his low condition. And yet I took a kind of admiration of him too. He was so bold, so contradictory, so brazenly impertinent withal, that I began to feel there was more in his sex than I had suspected.

"Child," says I, "I am dreadfully enraged with you and with your ways, but," I added, musingly, while I read the decision in his face, "do you know I have half a mind to love you for them."

"Pray don't," says he, uneasily.

"I have, though. I think you'll make the prettiest man that ever was. You are not a bit according to the pattern. You appear to even have a will, a very unusual circumstance in anything that's masculine. Child," I says, "do you know that I have half a mind to make a husband of you? I like you, my lad. You are headstrong, but I think you are a charming boy."

I patted him upon the shoulder with an air of high approval. He knit his teeth, and cried in a crimson heat:

"Confound you, woman, I am not your pussy-*cat, nor your King Charles' spaniel."

"No," says I; "and that is why I like you. You are so unstrokable."

"The key," says he.