"What nonsense!" remarked Hilda. "If you weren't married you would be urging me to go with you in a gondola."
"My dear, where would be the use? You know the gondolas are all bespoken by this time. What a sweet consciousness it is, by the way," added Page, sighing restfully.
"We are going, though, some night," returned his wife. "Before we leave the White City, you must take me in a gondola and hold my hand."
"See the lengths to which this woman's frenzy for spoons carries her! Why, I'll hold your hand now, my dear. Any suggestion which presupposes so little exertion as that will find me in an affirmative state of mind every time."
Hilda glanced at his offered hand scornfully. "We haven't the stage-setting," she replied. "Be careful, Robert Page, or you will frighten Mildred out of getting married at all."
"Is that true, Miss Mildred? Oh, I don't believe it. You are so level-headed you must see the situation in the right light. Did you ever hear the simile of the horse-car? When a man is trying to catch a horse-car and afraid it is going to escape him, he waves his arms, shouts, hurries, and disturbs himself generally. After he has caught the conveyance, if he continued to behave in the same perturbed fashion he would be set down as a lunatic. You see the point, of course?"
Mildred pursed her lips and shook her head. "You are a very audacious man," she answered.
"Now Jack isn't smoking," continued Page argumentatively. "That indicates the restlessness of the man who is afraid he will arrive too late at the street corner."
"It indicates that I am not going to stay here," returned Van Tassel.
"Whither away, restless one?"