The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking

by James Branch Cabell

But, "She is entirely too adorable," I reasoned with myself, some three-quarters of an hour later. "In fact, I regard it as positively inconsiderate in any impecunious young person to venture to upset me in the way she has done. Why, my heart is pounding away inside me like a trip-hammer, and I am absolutely light-headed with good-will and charity and benevolent intentions toward the entire universe! Oh, Avis, Avis, you know you hadn't any right to put me in this insane state of mind!"

I was, at this moment, retracing my steps toward the spot where I had climbed the wall between Gridlington and Selwoode, but I paused now to outline a reproachful gesture in the direction from which I came.

"What do you mean by having such a name?" I queried, sadly. "Avis! Why, it is the very soul of music, clear, and sweet and as insistent as a bird-call, an unforgettable lyric in four letters! It is just the sort of name a fellow cannot possibly forget. Why couldn't you have been named Polly or Lena or Margaret, or something commonplace like that, Avis—dear?"

And the juxtaposition of these words appealing to my sense of euphony, I repeated it, again and again, each time with a more relishing gusto. "Avis dear! dear Avis! dear, dear Avis!" I experimented. "Why, each one is more hopelessly unforgettable than the other! Oh, Avis dear, why are you so absolutely and entirely unforgettable all around? Why do you ripple all your words together in that quaint fashion till it sounds like a brook discoursing? Why did you crinkle up your eyes when I told you that as yet unbotanised flower was a Calycanthus arithmelicus? And why did you pout at me, Avis dear? A fellow finds it entirely too hard to forget things like that. And, oh, dear Avis, if you only knew what nearly happened when you pouted!"

I had come to the wall by this, but again I paused to lament.

"It is very inconsiderate of her, very thoughtless indeed. She might at least have asked my permission, before upsetting my plans in life. I had firmly intended to marry a rich woman, and now I am forming all sorts of preposterous notions—"

Then, on the bench where I had first seen her, I perceived a book. It was the iron-gray book she had been reading when I interrupted her, and I now picked it up with a sort of reverence. I regarded it as an extremely lucky book.

Subsequently, "Good Lord!" said I, aloud, "what luck!"

For between the pages of Justus Miles Forman's Journey's End—serving as a book-mark, according to a not infrequent shiftless feminine fashion,—lay a handkerchief. It was a flimsy, inadequate trifle, fringed with a tiny scallopy black border; and in one corner the letters M. E. A. H., all askew, contorted themselves into any number of flourishes and irrelevant tendrils.

"Now M. E. A. H. does not stand by any stretch of the imagination for Avis Beechinor. Whereas it fits Margaret Elizabeth Anstruther Hugonin uncommonly well. I wonder now—?"