“Oh, Mr. Vocks,” said she, the beautiful coamings of her orbs brimming over with cheer, “how many equinoxes will hereafter wax and wane, search through this garden, but for one in vain.”
“You are quoting the Rubaiyat,” said he, “but with indifferent adhesion to the text.”
“Adhesion,” she replied, “was never one of my frailties,” and a trifle peaked [sic] withdrew to the distant angle of the iron settee.
Wilbert’s momentary harshness had already dissipated and he regretted this intrusion of pedantic nicety upon the moonlit promise of their double entente. “I bespeak a rapproachment,” he gallantly murmured and, sliding deftly along the parallel rods of metal subforming the trysting bench, found himself chilled by coming en rapport with a section of the seat not warmed by humane contact.
“But you must not reproach me,” she taunted shyly. “It is too plain that you were not brought up in Harrisburg, where men speak chivalrously to women and good breeding is a native filament of the tender air.”
“Probably you are cold on that hitherto unfrequented segment of iron slatting,” he said, shrivelling his inward tremolo by an affection of stern brusque. “Why not slide over this way a little, and chivalry commends my sheltering you from the sharp fidgetings of frost which, however commendable to coal dealers, betray the softer passions to gooseflesh and eventual snivel.”
Womanly, without further quibble, she responded, and the beauty of that unsophisticated face was shielded soon from external examination by the protective polygon of his arm and elbow. It was a generous moment, and in harmony with all the higher laws of human sentiment.
The delighted reader might be pardoned for thinking that in this idyllic scene the restless affections of Mr. Vocks had found satisfaction. But Frederica, after several evenings of intellectual interchange, proved too shallow for his deep-laden mind. As Mr. Dargason put it (his taste for oddly mixed nautical metaphors was rather extreme):
He grounded upon the shoals of her mentality and, after striving vainly to warp off into deeper areas of thought and sentiment, was forced to broach his cargo of affection upon the outgoing tides. Only thus, by careening and jettisoning his rich hatches of emotional freight, and scudding forth under bare poles and jury rigging, was he able to win clear to the open sea of freedom, escaping the lee shores of an uncongenial union. The bright occulting lamps of her eyes shone like desperate beacons, but he remembered that lighthouses are intended not to allure the cautious mariner, but to warn him away. He reefed his binnacle gravely, and with only an aching heart throbbing in the empty hatches of his personality determined henceforward to steer by the unquestionable stars of intuition. Her soundings were too easily fathomed. In a word, she was not deep enough.
To quiet his melancholy, Mr. Vocks returns into the busy world of trade. We have not space for very full quotation, but his discussion with his business associates is worth a brief extract: