"And if I had," he asks, "would you mind?"
"I should be delighted!" I say quickly. "If you had made love to people, and been thrown overboard, you know, and people had made love to you, you would be so much better qualified to make love to me! I should like to have a lover who had been in love hundreds of times, but considered me the nicest, and liked me the best of all! That would be something to be proud of, would it not?"
"You don't understand about these things, dear," he says sadly.
"If you cared for me you would wish to be the first girl I had ever loved. You would begrudge those other women having known me before you did."
"I wonder what it is to care," I say, drawing a long tress of hair through my fingers, and looking down at the water flowing at our feet. "If to care for you is to like you very much when you are not making love to me, then I care for you very much indeed!"
But George does not answer; he is looking straight away over my head at the distant hills, thinking hard and deep, and the misery in his blue eyes hurts me. I never could bear to see anything, even a worm, suffer.
"George," I say, slipping my hand into his, "don't fret about it; perhaps it will come in time, you know, and———"
"Have you ever seen the man you could care about?" he asks, stroking my hand gently between his own.
"In my dreams, perhaps," I say, laughing. "Where else could I have met him?"
"You have never been away from home," he goes on, "save to school; and you could not see any one there. But do you know Nell, sometimes I have thought that the reason you don't love me is because you have a fancy for somebody else? A silly notion, is it not?"
