“Oh, don’t let me monopolize you, Mr. Strang. I am quite safe here till Nor returns. There are so many people thirsting for you.”
“Oh, I’d rather stay with you,” he averred, disingenuously.
“Don’t be a mere man,” she returned, raising her dark eyebrows. “Even your admirers think you more than that. It’s not fair for me to keep you from them.”
He was rather in a quandary. He could not tell her he was waiting for her friend.
To his relief, “Ah, I see them coming,” she said. “You’ll be off duty in a moment. I must introduce you to Dolkovitch. He’s great fun. He will invite you to his spiritual Sunday afternoons. Do you judge people by their hat-racks?”
He stared at her.
“I mean when they’ve got company. Dolk’s hat-rack when he’s ‘at home’ is lovely; I’d go miles to see it. Such curious curly, dusty, many-hued, amorphous things on the pegs—a cosmopolitan congress, only the chimney-pot unrepresented. Nor goes to meet the earnest people, but I go to see their hats. Oh, M. Dolkovitch, do let me introduce Mr. Strang. He is dying to know you.”
“De-lighted,” said Dolkovitch. “But I do not like this word ‘dying,’ Miss Regan.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon—I forgot,” said Olive. “Mr. Strang is living to know you. M. Dolkovitch, like the ancient Greeks, Mr. Strang, doesn’t like to think of death.”
“I can’t let you misrepresent him to a stranger, Olive,” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “M. Dolkovitch is wide as the poles asunder from Pagan thought, Mr. Strang. His teaching simply is that, as there is no death, but merely upward evolution, the sooner the word is banished from our vocabulary the better.”