“Dear me! Poor old Basil! If you keep such lofty ideals always before you you’ll soon cease being a social success. Besides,” she glibly continued, “it is not in your line to ponder and reflect like a fuzzy old owl; you are a man of action, par excellence, and when one tries to force one’s talents one does nothing with grace.”
“Are you turning philosopher?” he tried to taunt her.
“Philosophy is becoming part of my day’s work,” she airily replied. “But now do look at Bolingbroke; he is awfully jealous!”
“Bolingbroke! May I be pardoned for hazarding another question? Who is Bolingbroke?”
Marguerite looked at Basil, and again her glance held a subtle mixture of mirth and gravity.
“You—as I remarked before—are getting into the sad habit of forgetting your most faithful friends and honest admirers. Why this is Bolingbroke!” And she pointed with an upward toss of her obstinate little chin to a gilded swing whereon reposed, in magnificent dignity, a great white cockatoo, crested and tailed with brilliant orange. Some subterranean disturbance was agitating his snowy breast feathers, and his round eyes, dilated with greed, watched Marguerite’s every move as she fed the lesser luminaries below.
“Oh, you wretched usurper!” She addressed him grandiloquently. “This form of food would neither suit nor please you, and yet you covet it! Isn’t that very human?” she tragically demanded of Basil, who had at last managed to summon an apology for a laugh to his assistance. “Remind yourself,” she went on flippantly, “that, unlike some others of his kind, he cannot express his desires by word of beak. Repressed inclinations are hard to bear, but the impossibility of ever giving them voice, excepting by shrieks of distress, must be awful indeed!”
Basil was watching her intently, trying in vain to discover whether she was quite as joyful as she seemed.
“Would you oblige me by making a long arm—you are so agreeably tall—and presenting this token of our joint regard to yonder regicide?” she resumed, indicating a majolica wooden shoe on a table close by. “No, not the whole thing; one of the therein-contained biscuits ... please!”
And while complying with her request Basil was thinking, thinking, thinking! “What a coward I am! Why not tell her the truth? What’s the use of shirking the task because it hurts me to do the right thing? And what would she really care, this heavenly baby, with her toys, her exquisite amusements, her deadly simplicity? She will not miss me a moment of all those years to come.”