"I'll say it for you. Close your ears till I'm done." After a pause: "I've insulted myself. I love you all the more for it! Grace, you must be brave! If you survive this next week—"
"My God!" she said, invoking divine aid for the first time since they moved to Fifth Avenue, thinking of what the newspapers could say.
"He's with us, sweetheart," Hendrik assured her. "Are you an Episcopalian?"
"Yes!" she replied before she could think of not answering.
"Good! I love you. Wait!"
His voice as he entreated her to wait rang with such anguish that she irrepressibly asked, "What?"
"I love you!"
He left the telephone and gathered together sixty-eight clippings, which he put in an envelope. He went to a fashionable florist, opened an account, and ordered some exquisite flowers. They were going to ask for financial references, but the flowers he ordered were so expensive that they felt ashamed of their own distrust. He stopped at Valiquet's, where they hated him so much that they respected him, bought a wonderful gold vanity-box, inside of which he sent a card. On the card he wrote:
More than ever!
H. R.