This was something like a personal rebuke.  Whether she so meant it, Barfoot could not determine.  He hoped she did, for the more personal their talk became the better he would be pleased.

‘I, for one,’ he said, ’very seldom urge that plea, whether in my own defence or another’s.  But it answers to a spirit we can’t altogether dispense with.  Don’t you feel ever so little regret that your severe logic prevailed?’

‘Not the slightest regret.’

Everard thought this answer magnificent.  He had anticipated some evasion.  However inappropriately, he was constrained to smile.

’How I admire your consistency!  We others are poor halting creatures in comparison.’

‘Mr. Barfoot,’ said Rhoda suddenly, ’I have had enough of this.  If your approval is sincere, I don’t ask for it.  If you are practising your powers of irony, I had rather you chose some other person.  I will go my way, if you please.’

She just bent her head, and left him.

Enough for the present.  Having raised his hat and turned on his heels, Barfoot strolled away in a mood of peculiar satisfaction.  He laughed to himself.  She was certainly a fine creature—­yes, physically as well.  Her out-of-door appearance on the whole pleased him; she could dress very plainly without disguising the advantages of figure she possessed.  He pictured her rambling about the hills, and longed to be her companion on such an expedition; there would be no consulting with feebleness, as when one sets forth to walk with the everyday woman.  What daring topics might come up in the course of a twenty-mile stretch across country!  No Grundyism in Rhoda Nunn; no simpering, no mincing of phrases.  Why, a man might do worse than secure her for his comrade through the whole journey of life.

Suppose he pushed his joke to the very point of asking her to marry him?  Undoubtedly she would refuse; but how enjoyable to watch the proud vigour of her freedom asserting itself!  Yet would not an offer of marriage be too commonplace?  Rather propose to her to share his life in a free union, without sanction of forms which neither for her nor him were sanction at all.  Was it too bold a thought?

Not if he really meant it.  Uttered insincerely, such words would be insult; she would see through his pretence of earnestness, and then farewell to her for ever.  But if his intellectual sympathy became tinged with passion—­and did he discern no possibility of that?  An odd thing were he to fall in love with Rhoda Nunn.  Hitherto his ideal had been a widely different type of woman; he had demanded rare beauty of face, and the charm of a refined voluptuousness.  To be sure, it was but an ideal; no woman that approached it had ever come within his sphere.  The dream exercised less power over him than a few years ago; perhaps because his youth was behind him.  Rhoda might well represent the desire of a mature man, strengthened by modern culture and with his senses fairly subordinate to reason.