And my first thought was, "Oh, how gladly I would give the gold of Ormus and of Alaska just to have my letter back!" But I had mailed it, shuffling to the corner in my slippers, and without any collar on, in the hushed middle of the night, because my letter had seemed so important then.
6
"Will you not have me, lady?" I began that afternoon.
"No, my lord," she demurely responded, "for I've decided it would be too much like living in my Sunday-clothes."
And "I give it up. So what's the answer?" was my annotation.
"Oh, I'm not making jokes to-day. Why are you so—Oh, as we used to say at school," she re-began, "Que diable allais-tu faire dans cette galere?"
"I was born in a vale of tears, Elena, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation."
She came to me, and her finger-tips touched my hand ever so lightly. "That is another quotation, I suppose. And it is one other reason why I mean not to marry you. Frankly, you bore me to death with your erudition; you are three-quarters in love with me, but you pay heaps less attention to what I say about anything than to what Aristotle or some other old fellow said about it. Oh, that I should have lived to be jealous of Aristotle! Indeed I am, for I have the misfortune to be hideously in love with you. You are so exactly the sort of infant I would like to adopt."
"Love," I suggested, "while no longer an excuse for marriage, is at least a palliation."
"Listen, dear. From the first I have liked you, but that was not very strange, because I like almost everybody; but it was strange I should have remembered you and have liked the idea of you ever since you went away that first time."