IX
WITH AN ENGAGED GIRL
Miss Velrose and Rollington will be engaged within twenty-four hours.
In the sanctuary of love we find many who came to scoff and remain to pray; and Cupid in the sacristy, tugging at his vestments, is guilty of a purely voluntary and perhaps not wholly decorous drooping of one eyelid.
Miss Velrose and Rollington have come back from the boathouse. They are sitting on the stone bench under that maple.
Ah! Cupid has changed! Now he is reared in a kindergarten and is object-taught rather than book-taught. Arrows have gone out. Anyway, they sometimes were geared with a white feather. Cupid is now using a repeater—and smokeless powder. You can’t locate him.
It is not so much that there is any difference in Rollington. The difference is in Miss Velrose. I have seen it coming on. They will be engaged to-day.
A man might propose and give no sign. There may be nothing absurd in the supposition that men ceased going on their knees when they abandoned knee-breeches and began wearing trousers, to which such an attitude is assumed to be an injustice. The theory has a chronological plausibility. But doubtless we shall find that there are other, if less pictorial, reasons for the change.