“I haven’t the slightest idea. But, anyway, the moon was awful gibbous, and the moonlight was misty, like spray, you know,—and it flooded the Coliseum, and ran over onto the dome of St. Peter’s——”
“What nonsense are you talking? You can’t see St. Peter’s from the Coliseum, can you? Have you ever been to Rome?”
“Now that you mention it, I don’t believe I have! But what’s the use of imagination, if you can’t see things you’ve never seen?”
“You are too ridiculous!” declared Patty, laughing, and then nodding him a dismissal, as Cadwalader Oram claimed her for a dance.
“How she is made for happiness,” said Austin, as he dropped into a chair beside Lady Kitty, and together they watched Patty dance away.
“She is,” agreed Kitty, who was a life-long friend of Floyd Austin, and greatly liked the young man; “yet she’s not nearly so much of a butterfly as she seems.”
“I’m sure of that,—though I’ve only seen her butterflyish side. If Meredith hadn’t already used the phrase, ‘a dainty rogue in porcelain,’ I should coin it to describe Miss Fairfield. Don’t tell me she has an aim in life.”
“Not quite that; but I think sometimes she wishes she had one.”
“You mean, she thinks she ought to wish she had one.”