“Oh, I’m not indifferent at all!” said she, quickly.  “I’m never indifferent to anything or anybody.  But I’m sorry, very sorry that—­that you should feel—­”

She stopped short, looked at him for a moment curiously, and asked with great abruptness: 

“Do you feel anything in the matter? Really feel, I mean?  I don’t think you do; I don’t think you can.  You couldn’t speak so nicely, if you did.”

He looked at her with gentle reproach.  His was not a very tempestuous feeling, perhaps, but it was genuine, honest, sincere.  He thought her the most splendid specimen of handsome, healthy well-brought-up womanhood he had ever met, and he thought also that the beneficent influence of the Church, exercised through the unworthy medium of himself, would mold her into a creature as near perfection as was humanly possible.

Her way of receiving his advances was perplexing.  He was not easily disconcerted, but he did not answer her 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.”