He stood there puffing, his hair mussed up, his eyes wrathful. "Well," he growled at length; "why don't you go get your scissors."
"Shall I?" she said doubtfully—and at the same time bounced out like a little rabbit. "Take off your shirt, Goosie," she said, returning with the gleaming instruments, now symbolical of her superior common-sense.
She aided him. She took off his collar and tie, unfastened the buttons, and then she was tugging at the shirt. It slid down, uncovering the shoulders. There was a dry, crackling sound, as of a fan stretched open—and Dolly sat down on the floor. "Oh-oh-oh," she cried, "Go-oo-oo-ssie-ie!"
He stood there, looking out of the corner of his eye at his reflection in the mirror, red-faced and very much abashed. For with the slipping of the shirt, on his shoulders there had sprung, with the movement of a released jack-in-the-box, two vibrant white things.
Two gleaming, lustrous, white things that were——
"They're wings," said Dolly, still on the floor. "They are wings," she repeated, in the tone of one saying, He is dead. "Now, Goosie, you have done it!"
But a change had come in Charles-Norton. The blush had left his brow, the foolish expression his face; he was pivoting before the mirror like a woman with a new bonnet.
"I like them," he said.
And then, "Just look at them, Dolly. Just look at the curve of them. Isn't it a beautiful curve! And the whiteness of them, Dolly—like a baby's soul. And how downy—soft like you, Dolly. Look at them gleam. And they move, Dolly, they move! Dolly, oh, look!"
The wings were gently breathing; their slender tips struck his waist at each oscillation. The movement quickened, became a beat, a rapid palpitation. A soft whirring sound filled the room; the newspaper on the bed, dislodged, eddied to the floor; the wings were a mere white blur. Suddenly Charles-Norton's feet left the floor, and he rose slowly into the air. "Look, look, Dolly," he cried, as he went up, hovering above her up-tilted nose and her wide eyes, as she sat there, paralyzed, upon the ground; "Dolly, look!"