She replied: “I am one who serves all gods. I honor every tribe of those divine beings whose existence scholars have so variously accounted for as the products of physical and ethical and historical and etymological blunders abetted by homonymy and polonymy. But I require for my piety a honorarium.”
“And what is that honorarium?”
She told him.
And as she spoke, Evaine drew near to him, and yet nearer, and she was remarkably desirable. If only she had not now reminded Gerald more and more of Evelyn Townsend, she would have been resistless.
“Very well, then!” said Gerald, affably: “you shall have that honorarium to-morrow morning if you still care to demand a reward so trivial.”
Immediately afterward he said, “But, indeed, ma’am, you quite misunderstand me!”
Then with a few well-chosen words he placed their relationship upon a more decorous basis.
And Evaine the Fox-Spirit laughed. Such unresponsiveness she declared to be, when manifested by a god, wholly surprising, and comparable to the Seven Wonders of the World, namely: (1) the Pyramids of Egypt; (2) the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; (3) the Tomb of Mausolos; (4) the Temple of Diana at Ephesus; (5) the Colossus of Rhodes; (6) the Statue of Zeus by Phidias; and (7) the Pharos at Alexandria. Yet, Evaine continued, she perceived that she might trust him—
“You may do nothing of the sort!” said Gerald, decisively. “You may not even give me all. No, ma’am, it would be quite unadvisable, because, as I am forced to point out, you in your unfading youth and omniscient learning are many thousands of years older than I am in my present incarnation. Beside you, I am a mere boy. Now, it is often a great disadvantage to a boy, it is by and by a curse to him, to succumb to the loving confidence and generosity of a woman much older than himself. It is unwholesome. It is un-American.”
“Is it, then, inconsistent with the manners of a continent in the Western Hemisphere—first named America by Waldseemüller, a teacher of geography in the college of Saint-Dié among the Vosges, in a treatise called Cosmographia, published in 1507,—for me to like you so much that I just want to touch you and be near you?”