"It—it had fallen on the floor," I kept on, for of course whatever you do you must do with all your might, as we learn in copy-book days.
"And it never occurred to you to turn on the light?" she demanded, coming up and looking at me as if to see the extent of disfigurement this new malady had wrought. "Down on your knees searching for a key—and it never occurred to you to turn on the light?"
"No," I answered, thankful to be able to tell the truth again. "No, it never once occurred to me!"
CHAPTER XI
TWO MEN AND A MAID
Have you ever thought that the reason we can so fully sympathize with certain great people of history, and not with others, is because we are occasionally granted a glimpse of the emotion our favorites enjoyed—or endured?
For instance, no man who has ever knocked the "t" out of "can't" stands beside Napoleon's tomb without a sensation which takes the form of: "We understand each other—don't we, old top?"
And every year at spring-time, Romeo is patted on the back condescendingly by thousands of youths—so susceptible that they'd fall in love with anything whose skirt and waist met in the back.
The night of the Kendalls' dance I knew what Cleopatra's cosmic consciousness resembled—exactly. I knew it from the moment she glanced away from the glint of her silver oars of the wonderful Nile barge (because the glint of Antony's dark eyes was so much more compelling) to the hour she recklessly unwrapped the basket of figs in her death chamber! I ran the whole gamut of her emotions—'twixt love and duty—and I came out of it feeling that—well, certainly I felt that a conservatory is a room where eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves!
"Is everybody crazy to-night?" I whispered to Guilford, as we paused for a moment before the dancing commenced just outside one of the downy, silky reception rooms—quite apart from the noisy ballroom farther back—and I saw two people inside. The girl was seated before the piano, and was singing softly, while the man stood at her side, listening with a rapt expression.
"Who would ever have thought that that girl would be singing that song to that man?" I asked, with a quivery little feeling that the world was going topsyturvy with other people besides me. The singer was the careless, rowdy golf champion of the state, and the man listening was Oldburgh's astonishing young surgeon—the kind who never went anywhere because it was said he laid aside his scalpel only when he was obliged to pick up his fork.