"Your aunt was kind enough to ask me for so long."
"I shall go back on Saturday. If I were to stay longer I should
feel myself to be in her way. And I have come to live a sort of
hermit's life. I hardly know how to sit down and eat my dinner in
company, and have no idea of seeing a human being before two
o'clock."
"What do you do with yourself?"
"I rush in and out of the garden and spend my time between my books
and my flowers and my tobacco pipes."
"Do you mean to live always like that?" she asked, in perfect
innocency.
"I think so. Sometimes I doubt whether it's wise."
"I don't think it wise at all," said Mary.
"Why not?"
"People should live together, I think."
"You mean that I ought to have a wife?"
"No;--I didn't mean that. Of course that must be just as you might
come to like any one well enough. But a person need not shut
himself up and be a hermit because he is not married. Lord Rufford
is not married and he goes everywhere."
"He has money and property and is a man of pleasure."
"And your cousin, Mr. John Morton."
"He is essentially a man of business, which I never could have
been. And they say he is going to be married to that Miss Trefoil
who has been staying there. Unfortunately I have never had anything
that I need do in all my life, and therefore I have shut myself up
as you call it.
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