TWO ON A TOUR
only wonder you’ve never lifted it! But you could be happy only with a very learned and prominent man, you are so clever!”
“I’m clever enough to prefer love to learning, if I have to choose, Dolly, my dear.”
“I’m so sorry you did n’t get a letter, Charlotte,” said the girl, snuggling sympathetically to my side on the bench.
This was more than flesh and blood or angel could bear!
I kissed her, and, shaking her off my shoulder vigorously, I said, as I straightened my hat: “As a matter of fact, Miss Valentine, I have had a letter every day since we left New York; a letter delivered before breakfast by the steward. You have had but one, yet you are twenty and I am thirty!”
“Charlotte!”
“Don’t add to your impudence by being too astonished, darling,” I continued. “Come! let’s go and pick bananas and pineapples and tamarinds and shaddocks and star-apples and sapodillas!”
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