Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 3.djvu/120

 Rosy flinched a moment; then she said, serenely, 'Oh, I don't care for that!'

'You ought to, to be consistent, though, possibly, she shouldn't, admitting that she wouldn't. You have more imagination than logic—which of course, for a woman, is quite right. That's what makes you say that her ladyship is in affliction because I go to a place that she herself goes to without the least compulsion.'

'She goes to keep you off,' said Rosy, with decision.

'To keep me off?'

'To interpose, with the Princess; to be nice to her and conciliate her, so that she may not take you.'

'Did she tell you any such rigmarole as that?' Paul inquired, this time staring a little.

'Do I need to be told things, to know them? I am not a fine, strong, superior male; therefore I can discover them for myself,' answered Rosy, with a dauntless little laugh and a light in her eyes which might indeed have made it appear that she was capable of wizardry.

'You make her out at once too passionate and too calculating,' the young man rejoined. 'She has no personal feelings, she wants nothing for herself. She only wants one thing in the world—to make the poor a little less poor.'

'Precisely; and she regards you, a helpless, blundering bachelor, as one of them.'

'She knows I am not helpless so long as you are about the place, and that my blunders don't matter so long as you correct them.'

'She wants to assist me to assist you, then!' the girl exclaimed, with the levity with which her earnestness was