It seems to me to have a dissuasive inflection.
"Are you going in ?" "Well, yes," I answer uncertainly, "I suppose so." He looks at his watch.
"It is quite early yet--not near luncheon-time--would it bore you very much to take a turn in the park?
I think" (with a smile) "that you are quite honest enough to say so if it would: or, if you did not, I should read it on your face." "Would you ?" say I, a little piqued.

"I do not think you would: I assure you that my face can tell stories, at a pinch, as well as its neighbor." "Well, _would_ it bore you ?" "Not at all! not at all!" reply I briskly, beginning to descend again; "but one thing is very certain, and that is that it will bore _you_." "Why should it ?" "If I say what I was going to say you will think that it is on purpose to be contradicted," I answer, unlatching the gate in the fence, and entering the park.
"And if I do, much you will mind," he answers, smiling.
"Well, then," say I, candidly, looking down at my feet as they trip quickly along through the limp winter grass, "there is no use blinking the fact that I have no conversation--none of us have.

We can gabble away among ourselves like a lot of young rooks, about all sorts of silly home jokes, that nobody but us would see any fun in; but when it comes to real talk--" I pause expressively.
"I do not care for _real talk_," he says, looking amused; "I like _gabble_ far, far better.

I wish you would gabble a little now." But the request naturally ties my tongue tight up.
"This is the tree that they planted when father was born," I say, presently, in a stiff, _cicerone_ manner, pointing to a straight and strong young oak, which is lifting its branchy head, and the fine net-work of its brown twigs, to the cold, pale sky.
Sir Roger leans his arms on the top of the palings that surround the tree.
"Ah! eight-and-forty years ago! eight-and-forty years ago!" he repeats to himself with musing slowness.

"Hard upon half a century!" I turn over in my own mind whether I should do well to make some observation of a trite and copy-book nature on the much greater duration of trees than men, but reflecting that the application of the remark may be painful to a person so elderly as the gentleman beside me, I abstain.
However, he does something of the kind himself.
"To think that it should be such a stripling," he says, looking with a half-pensive smile at the straight young trunk, "hardly out of the petticoat age, and _we_--he and I--such a couple of old wrecks!" It never occurs to me that it would be polite, and even natural, to contradict him.