"Next month," he was thinking to himself as he lay with his hands
behind his head, not caring to shade his handsome and well-tanned face
from the warm sun--"next month I shall be twenty-one, and most folks
will consider me a man. Anyhow, I don't know the man whom I wouldn't
fight or run or ride or shoot against for any wager he liked. But of
all the people who know anything about me, just that one whose opinion
I care for will not consider me a man at all, but only a boy. And that
without saying anything. You can tell, somehow, by a mere look, what
her feelings are; and you know that what she thinks is true. Of course
it's true--I am only a boy. What's the good of me to anybody? I could
look after a farm--that is, I could look after other people doing
their work--but I couldn't do any work myself. And that seems to me
what she is always looking at: 'What's the good of you, what are you
doing, what are you busy about?' It's all very well for her to be
busy, for she can do a hundred thousand things, and she is always at
them. What can I do?"
Then his wandering day-dreamings took another turn: "It was an odd
thing for Mabyn to say--'_That is when you are in love with some
one_.' But those girls take everything for love. They don't know how
you can admire, almost to worshiping, the goodness of a woman, and how
you are anxious that she should be well and happy, and how you would
do anything in the world to please her, without fancying straight away
that you are in love with her, and want to marry her and drive about
in the same carriage with her.
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