“Not on you,” I protested.
She looked at me with tender sparkling eyes, the same lovely light-brown eyes that had fascinated me as a boy. Brown eyes for a woman, always! But they must not be of the heavy commonplace shades of brown like a deer’s or a cow’s. They must have light shades in them, tints verging toward blue or green. Said Edna: “I’m doing my best to fit myself. And before I get through, Godfrey, I think I’ll go far.”
“Sure you will,” said I, with no disposition to turn the cold douche on her kind of romance. What an idiot I was about her, to be sure! I went on: “And I’ll see that you have the money to grease the toboggan slide and make the going easy.”
She talked on happily and confidingly: “Yes, it’s best to leave Margot another year as a boarder at Miss Ryper’s. By that time we’ll be established over in New York, and we’ll have a proper place for her to receive her friends. And perhaps we’ll have a few friends of our own.”
“Swell friends, eh?”
“Please don’t say swell, dear,” corrected she. “It’s such a common word.”
“I’ve heard you say it,” I protested.
“But I don’t any more. I’ve learned better. And now I’ve taught you better.”
“Anything you like. Anybody you like,” said I. When Edna and I were together, with our hands clasped, I was always completely under her spell. She could do what she pleased with me, so long, of course, as she didn’t interfere in my end of the firm. And I may add that she never did; she hadn’t the faintest notion what I was about. They say there are thousands of American women in the cities who know their husbands’ places of business only as street and telephone numbers. My wife was one of that kind. Oh, yes, from the standpoint of those who insist that business and home should be separate, we were a model couple.
“There’s another matter I want to talk over with you, Godfrey,” she went on.