Your eyes, at this moment, are as brilliant as fire--your lips like carnation--and your face like sunlit gold; recollect, I'm a poet.

I'm positively rejoiced at the good luck which made me bring such a lovely expression into your fair countenance." Fanny turned her head away.
"Come now, Fanny," said Ralph, seriously, "I do believe you are going to find fault with my nonsense." No reply.
Mr.Ralph Ashley heaved a sigh; and was silent.
"You treat me like a child," said Fanny, reproachfully; "I am not a child." "You certainly are not, my dearest Fanny--you are a charming young lady--the most delicious of your sex." And Mr.Ralph Ashley accompanied these words with a glance so ludicrously languishing, that Fanny, unable to command herself, burst into laughter; and the quarrel was all made up, if quarrel it indeed had been.
"You _were_ a child in old times," said Mr.Ashley, throwing his foot elegantly over his knee; "and, I recollect, had a perfect genius for blindman's-buff; but, of course, at sixteen you have 'put away' all those infantile or 'childish things'-- though I am sincerely rejoiced to see that you have not 'become a man.'" Fanny laughed.
"I wish I was," she said.
"What ?" "Why a man." "Oh! you're very well as you are;--though if you were a 'youth,' I'm sure, Fanny dear, I should be desperately fond of you." "Quite likely." "Oh, nothing truer; and everybody would say, 'See the handsome friends.' Come now, would'nt we make a lovely couple." "Lovely!" "Suppose we try it." "Try what ?" "Being a couple." Fanny suddenly caught, from the laughing eye, the young man's meaning, and began to color.
"I see you understand, my own Fanny," observed Mr.Ralph, "and I expected nothing less from a young lady of your quickness.

What say you?
It is not necessary for me to say that I'm desperately in love with you." "Oh, not at all necessary!" replied Fanny, satirically, but with a blush.
"I see you doubt it." "Oh, not at all." "Which means, as usual with young ladies, that you don't believe a word of it.

Well, only try me.

What proof will you have ?" Fanny laughed with the same expression of constraint which we have before observed, and said: "You have not looked upon the map of Virginia yet for my 'boundaries ?'" Ralph received the hit full in the front.
"By Jove! Fanny," he exclaimed, "I oughtn't to have told you that." "I'm glad you did." "Why ?" "Because, of course, I shall not make any efforts to please you--you are already 'engaged!'" "Engaged! well, you are wrong.