Free Elisabeth Kidd by A Hero for Antonia Page B

do with promoting such nonsense, however, and I do not understand how you can allow such much more likely tales to be spread about yourself. Do your aunts believe them?”
    “Julia does not credit them, but I sometimes suspect Hester of inventing half of them herself. I believe she thinks they enhance my prospects.”
    “Nonsense! You must have every matchmaking mama in town encamped on your doorstep as it is.”
    “I do. That is precisely the end for which Hester strives.”
    She frowned. “Do you truly wish to have a wife chosen for you?”
    “Have you an alternative suggestion?”
    “No, indeed!” she stumbled, put off by the apparent earnestness of the question. “How should I? I merely wonder that you cannot—that is, you must know what you want. Is there no one you...you wish to offer for?”
    “Oh, yes. But she has refused me.”
    “Who—oh, I take it you are referring to me! But you will have to do better than a Shakespearean aside at a dinner party, you know—I was scarcely attending.”
    “Very well.”
    Before she had quite caught up with his thinking, she found her hand being held in his—his horse’s reins being carelessly discarded—and herself being addressed forcefully.
    “My dear Miss Fairfax! Allow me to tell you how very ardently—I beg your pardon, but it is as difficult to be ardent on horseback as at a dinner party—my dear Miss Fairfax, you must know how much I admire you! Will you...dare I hope you will consent to be my wife? Blast this animal!”
    He let go of her hands to steady his mount, and Antonia, who was torn between amusement and exasperation, finally burst into laughter at his foolishness. “Do you always make your offers so casually?”
    “I generally, as I have said, do not make them at all. Do you accept?”
    “I do not.”
    He did not look very disappointed. “I understand that it is usual with young ladies to reject, sometimes two or three times, the addresses of the man they secretly mean to accept, and I am therefore by no means discouraged.”
    “However do you come to understand anything so idiotish?”
    “Why, I have it on the best of authority, Miss Fairfax. That delightful novel you insisted I read tells me it is true, and I must therefore suppose it to be so.”
    “Well, let me tell you, sir, I have at least as many refusals at my command as you may have offers.”
    “Excellent! I shall essay my various styles on you. May I?”
    “Certainly not.”
    “You refuse to help me? How am I to know what is the proper thing to say when such time should come that I meet the young woman I shall—er, wish to offer for?”
    “You cannot expect me to choose a wife for you!”
    “Why not?”
    “Why, it is the same as ... as selecting another man’s home for him!” she said, “Would you send Mr Gary to purchase a house on your behalf?”
    “I trust his judgement.”
    “Oh! Oh—thank you.”
    A wicked gleam came into his eye. “But the fact is, I asked you to help me choose the words, not the woman. Believe me, I am quite capable of making that choice myself.”
    “I am sure I may hope so!” she said, indignant at being again drawn into the same trap. But then she had to laugh at her own slow-wittedness. Really, it had been much too long since she had engaged in a verbal sparring match with so quick an opponent! It occurred to her that this was the one thing she had missed from her life in London—the opportu nity to exchange in both nonsense and earnest conversation with someone intelligent enough to follow her nimblest thoughts and to make verbal leaps of his own that challenged her mind to follow.
    “Tell me, Antonia,” he said then, with another of those quicksilver shifts that so disconcerted her, “what are you going to do with yourself when your brother grows up at last and comes home to take his proper place as head of the family? Will you continue here as you have been?”
    She considered several defiant retorts, but she had always been all