"
"If I did it, I don't believe I'd ever regret it," was her amazing
rejoinder.
Stupefied yet dauntless, he returned to the charge.
"You're talking sheer nonsense, you silly girl, and you know it," he
said. "If you were to go back to Old Church to marry the miller, you'd
be sorry before you got up to the altar."
"I'm not going back there to marry him," she persisted stubbornly, "but
I don't' believe if I were to do it, I'd ever regret it."
"You think you'd be satisfied to give up ten thousand a year and settle
down to raising chickens for a living?"
"I like raising chickens."
"And you'd expect that pursuit to make up to you for all you would
sacrifice--for the world and people and freedom to go and come as you
please?"
"I don't care about the world," she replied, sticking, he told himself,
as obstinately as a mule to her point, "and people seem to me just the
same everywhere."
"The same?" he repeated, "do you actually mean that you can't see any
difference?"
"No difference that matters. It's all in the clothes and the sillier
things they talk about. Why, I'd rather hear old Adam Doolittle talk
than that stupid Judge Grayson, who dined with us the other night, and
never mentioned anything but stocks.
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