She tripped over to the window and gazed out. “Isn’t it glorious?—And I feel so happy—so full of life, so young.” Her back was towards him; she felt him drawing nearer. “I ought to tell you about my hands before we know each other better. They have names. The right one is Miss Self-Reliance, and the left Miss Independence. They’re both of them very ambitious and—” she swung round, lowering her eyes—“and they don’t like being held.” He glanced at the photo on the piano. “Did no one ever hold them?”
“Hardly any one, truth and honest” She finished the last button and winked at him solemnly. “Here have I been ready since eleven, sending you cables and whole gardens of flowers.” She burst out laughing: “I’m glad you don’t drizzle. Come on, I’m hungry for the sun.”
As they shot down in the elevator he asked her: “Drizzle! That’s a new word. What do you mean by it?”
“You’ll know soon enough.” She nodded. “Sooner or later all men do it. Tom drizzles most awfully. He drizzled last night, when I didn’t want him to come up because I thought you’d be in the apartment.”
“Then you did think that? You hadn’t forgotten that it was the day I landed?”
“Forgotten after you’d cabled me! You must think me callous.”
She gave her shoulders a haughty shrug and ran down the steps into the sunlight. He followed, inwardly laughing. Already she had taught him one way of stealing a march on the rest of her suitors. All the other men grew gloomy—“drizzled,” as she called it—when they fancied that she had hurt their feelings. He decided, then and there, that under no provocation whatsoever would he drizzle. She might do what she liked to him, he would always meet her smiling. Amor Omnia Vincit should be the legend written on his banner.
“What shall we do?” She clasped her hands against her throat in a gesture of ecstasy.
“Anything you like.”
“Anything! Really anything? Even something quite expensive?”