“If what you mean is that I’m not much of a co-quette,” she came in quickly, to prevent his continuing, “I guess you’re right. Take it since I was born, I’ve been called a good many things, but in all my life I don’t remember anybody calling me that,–a co-quette. But you’re talking lots more than is good for you, brother. Now I want you to quiet down and give those sleepy-drops a chance to work. Here I’ve fixed you something else that will help them. It’s just a drink with nothing in it but something nice and cooling. Smells pleasant, doesn’t it? This’ll do the trick.”
Slipping an arm under his neck, she lifted him, propped him against herself, and held the glass to his mouth. Instead of words pouring out, the calming draught flowed in. It was a slow process; he drank by small swallows and wished after each one to stop, but she gently forced him to go on. When it was finished and he turned his head away from the glass, he found it resting on her shoulder. He settled his cheek warmly against it, like a child burying his face in the pillow. With a long sigh he relaxed.
“Now, Aurora,” he said solemnly, “be per–fect–ly still.”
He was very still, too. After a long moment he half 300lifted his head and with a long soft sigh replaced it, as if to renew his sense of a resting-place so sweet. With all her heart Aurora lent herself to this, glad to witness, as she thought, the belated effect of the soporific. In a few minutes he would be asleep.
“Aurora,” he suddenly said, wakeful as earlier, but without moving his heavy head or opening his eyes, “do you remember the first evening I ever saw you? You came down the middle of the room all by yourself, like something in the theater, where the stage has been cleared for the principal character to make an effect. You were a fine large lady in a sky-blue frock with bursts of pink, your hair spangled with diamonds, a fan in one hand, a long pair of gloves in the other. That at least is what everybody else saw that looked at you. But me, what I seemed to see was America coming toward me draped in the stars and stripes. Now you know how I feel about my dear country. If I loved it why should I have fixed my abode once and for all over here? And yet when I saw it coming toward me across the room, with your eyes and smile and look of Home, I felt like the tiredest traveler and exile in the whole world, who wants nothing, nothing, but to get Home again. It was like a moment’s insanity. I almost wonder that I resisted it, the desire to lay my head on your shoulder and cry, Aurora, and tell you about it, then never move again, or say another word.”
Aurora readjusted her position so as to make his leaning on her even easier. She brought a warm cover safe-guardingly around him.
“Poor Geraldino!” she pitied him in the lonely past.
“Then do you remember the first time I went to see you,” he asked, “and you introduced me, dearest woman, 301room by room, to the somewhat gruesome mysteries of your house? You walked before me holding a lamp. In the ball-room, hazy with vastness, you held the lamp high, like a torch. And I had a vision of you as America again, or Liberty, or Something, lighting the way for me.... But I treated the fancy as one treats fancies. I did not in the least intend to cultivate the acquaintance begun with your picking me up by the loose skin of the neck and plumping me down on the little seat of your victoria.”
“Why–Gerald!” she drawled in a tone of reproach purposely funny. “Didn’t you want to come?”
“I wanted not to come!” he answered, with normal spirit. “But you kept saying Jump in. When a lady has said Jump in three times it acts like a spell, a man has got to jump.”