“I don’t know and don’t care. People be hanged. There aren’t any people—only you and I alone in the world. How’d you like a new set of furs?”
“Now, do be good,” she would beg of him, eyeing the furs enviously.
“I don’t know,” he told her, “whether you really mean no or yes.”
“And perhaps I don’t know myself,” she mocked him.
Later, when wild-flowers of the streets flamed in the hedges of the dusk, they would again postpone their parting. Some new palace would magically spring up to lure them. Then they would dine to music and she would insist on acting the hostess and serving him; sometimes by seeming inadvertence their hands would touch. They would dawdle over their coffee; like a mother humoring a child full of fancies, at his repeated request she would sweeten his cup with the lips that were forbidden him. They might sit on all evening; they might stroll languorously off to find a new stimulus to illusion in a theatre. Their evenings were intolerably fugitive. Before midnight they would ride uptown through the carnival of Broadway, where light foamed on walls of blackness like champagne poured across ebony.
At first he was inclined to be dissatisfied that he gained so little ground: when he advanced, she retreated; when he retreated, she advanced. If, to woo him back to a proper demonstrativeness, she had to display some new familiarity, she was careful not to let it become a habit.
“The more stand-offish I am with you,” he said, “the more sweet you are to me. Directly I start to fall in love with you again——”
“Again?” she questioned, with a raising of her brows.
“Again,” he repeated stubbornly. “Directly I do that, you grow cold. The thing works automatically like a pair of scales—only we hardly ever balance. When you’re up, I’m down. When I’m up, you’re down.”
“What charming metaphors you use,” she exclaimed petulantly; and then, with swift tormenting compassion, “Poor Meester Deek.”