Through the mostly ugly, but sometimes queerly beautiful and always unique city they went together, Franklin and Beatrix followed by their entourage, and it came to them both that, in returning to the house in which they had joined forces in a manner that now appeared to them to be inconceivable, they were completing a curious and a useless circle. They had undergone strange feelings, placed themselves into difficult and dangerous situations, disconnected themselves from the irresponsibility, the right to which was theirs by inheritance, given up an individualism that was part and parcel of their training and environment, and all for what? To return discontented, disappointed and dispirited to the spot from which they had set out. He loved her and would lay his life at her feet and she loved him and would gladly be his servant, and both, being alike and having the same want of confidence when it came to the fundamentals, had not found it out. Fate had played a pretty game with these two for having dared to tamper with her. And, oddly enough, Ida Larpent was the only one of the characters in this little comedy from which she had made her exit who had guessed what Fate had done and now peeked through the cracks in the scenery to see how it was going to end. And she, being a worldling, suspicious of humanity, was not prepared to make a guess.
"Well," said Beatrix at last, gathering herself together. "We're almost there. In for a very amusing evening, if I know my respected and respectable family."
Franklin turned and looked at her. There was something in her voice,—a sort of school-girl note, the note of a high spirited young thing who had broken bounds and been discovered and faced punishment,—that made him shoot out a laugh.
"Why laugh?" she asked. She never tolerated being laughed at.
"You'd make a rattlesnake chortle." He laughed again.
"Look out, or I may hit you," she said. "It's one of the things that makes my arm utterly irresponsible."
He made a gesture that was almost French. "You beat me," he said. "By Jove, you beat me."
"If you'd beaten me it might have been different," she snapped back at him.
"One doesn't beat you," said Franklin. "God made you and that's the end of it, I find. No argument, as a man I know always says when the rain has set in for the day or a bottle's empty. You are you, kiddie, and so are the sun, the moon and the stars."
"You're a fool," she cried, "a fool, a fool!" And then she put her hand quickly over her mouth. What kind of a fool would she look if she allowed herself to fling out even the beginning of what was in her mind?