"I am the creature; you are the creator," he quickly interjected. "You are very beautiful, very! but you have much more than beauty. You have brains, and I think your heart is a marvelous lute—"
"A what?" she asked, curiously. No woman will allow the catalogue to be skimped or obscured.
"A lute, a wonderful musical instrument that some day will be played by a master hand. When you cease to be merely a girl and become a woman, with your capacity for loving when you let yourself go! Ah!" He closed his eyes and trembled.
All women, at heart, love to be accused of being psychic pyromaniacs.
"There will I give thee my loves!" he muttered, quoting from the "Song of Songs."
She knew it wasn't original because he said it so solemnly. She dared not ask from whom the quotation was. It sounded like Swinburne.
"Come!" He was not quoting this time. He stood before her, his face tense, his eyes aflame, his arms stretched imploringly toward her.
She met his gaze—and then she could not look away. She saw the wonderful man of whom the papers had printed miles of columns, who had made all New York talk of him for weeks, who was young and strong and comely and masterful, who had an old name and a fighting jaw, whose words stirred the pulses like a quickstep on the piccolo.
And his eyes made her understand what was meant by actinic rays. They were looking at her, piercing through her garments until she felt herself subtly divested of all concealments.
And then she trembled as if his eyes physically touched her! She thrilled, she blushed, she frowned—for she felt herself desired. And her thoughts became the thoughts of a woman who is wooed by life, by love, by a man's red blood and her own. Her New York inhibitions turned to ashes. Life-long mental habits withered and shriveled and vanished in microscopic flakes until into her self-hypnotized consciousness there came the eternal query of the female who has stopped running, "What can I give to this man?"