immediately. Then he said
softly:

"How could I speak in any way but what you call 'nicely' to _you_? To
the lady whom I am asking to be my wife?"

Doreen looked startled.

"Oh, don't, please! You don't know what a mistake you're making. I'm not
at all the sort of wife for you, really! Indeed, I couldn't recommend
myself as a wife to anybody, but especially to you."

"Why--especially to me?"

"Well, I'm not good enough."

"That sounds rather flattering. And yet, somehow, I don't fancy you mean
it to be so."

"Well, no, I don't," said Doreen, frankly; "for I mean by 'good' a lot
of qualities that I don't think highly of myself, such as getting up in
the middle of the night to go to early service, and being civil to
people I hate, and--and a lot of things like that. Don't you know that
I'm eminently deficient in all the Christian virtues?"

This was a question the curate had never asked himself; but it came upon
him at this moment with disconcerting force that she was right. Luckily
for his self-esteem, it did not occur to him at the same time that it
was this very lack of the conventional virtues, a certain freshness and
originality born of her defiant neglect of them, which formed the
stronger part of her attractiveness in his eyes.

After a short pause he answered, with his usual deliberation:

"Indeed, I am quite sure that you do yourself injustice."

"Oh, but I'm equally sure that I don't. I not only leave undone the
things which you would say I ought to do, and do the things which I
ought not to do, but I'm rather proud of it."

Still, Mr. Lindsay would not accept the repulse. He persisted in making
excuses for her and in believing them.

"Well, you fulfill your most important duty; you are the happiness and
the brightness of the house. Your father's face softens whenever you
come near him. Now, as that is your chief duty, and you fulfill it so
well, I am quite sure that if you entered another state of life where
your duties would be different, you would accommodate yourself, you
would fulfill your new duties as well as you did the old."

Doreen rewarded him for this speech with a humorous look, in which there
was something of gratitude, but more of rebellion.

"Accommodate myself? No, I couldn't. I think, do you know, that if I
were ever foolish enough to marry--and it would be foolishness in a
spoiled creature like me--I should want a husband who could accommodate
himself to me. Now, you couldn'