worst pains are said to be worth more than the greatest pleasures. He
was very much in earnest, and entirely straightforward, There were no
balancing indecisions now, but the most downright affirmation of
preference. His little speeches were not veiled in rosy clouds of
metaphor and poetry and distant allusions, like Captain Kendall's, nor
did they flow out in an unfailing stream of romantic eloquence, like
that gifted warrior's. They were so honest and so clumsy, indeed, that
Edith could not help laughing at them merrily sometimes, to his great
discomfiture, consisting as they did chiefly of such statements as, "You
know that I am most awfully fond of you. I was tremendously hard hit
from the first. If you don't believe me, you can ask Ramsay. I told him
all about it. You aren't in the least like any other girl that I have
ever known, except Mrs. De Witt a little. I suppose you know that I
would have married her at the dropping of a hat if I could have done so.
But that is all over now. I care an awful lot for you now, and shall be
quite frightfully cut up if you won't have anything to say to me,--I
shall, really. I have got quite wrapped up in you, upon my word. And I
shall be intensely glad and proud if you will consent to be my wife."

When Edith failed to take such speeches as these seriously, poor Mr.
Heathcote was quite beside himself, and, in reply to her bantering
accusations as to his being "a great flirt" and not "really meaning one
word that he said," opposed either burly negation or a deeply-vexed
silence. They looked at so many things differently that they found a
piquant interest in discussing every subject that came up.

"There go May Dunbar and Fred Beach," she said to him one Sunday as they
were coming home from church. "Isn't he handsome? They have been engaged
_three years_. Did you ever hear of such constancy?"