“Yes!—yes, indeed!” she answered. “The man’s attitude in the field—oh, dear me!—was simply delightful!” And she clapped her hands ecstatically. “You see, he’s such a good figure!—and he can drop on one knee gracefully—really gracefully!—and he meant it as well!—he was swearing eternal friendship!”
“Eternal fiddlesticks!” snarled the Philosopher. “Where’s my pipe?”
They were in the library, a cosy room with a big window fronting the west where the last golden lines of the sunset were vanishing one by one,—and it wanted about an hour to dinner time. She moved away and went searching to and fro, on various tables and shelves, her light figure in its dainty evening attire of pale blue and white fluttering hither and thither like an embodied flower, till presently she came back towards him holding out, at a respectful distance from herself, a rather dirty briar.
“Come along, come along!” said the Philosopher, testily. “Make haste! It won’t bite you!”
“No,” and she handed him the repulsive looking object. “But it smells—horrid! If you had a wife she would not allow you to come near her with such a smell!”
“Oh, wouldn’t she?” And the Philosopher stuck the pipe between his teeth with a defiant air. “If I had a wife—which, thank God, I haven’t—”
“Yes, thank God you haven’t!” she interpolated, demurely.
He looked at her again in his “withering” way, but she only smiled.
“If I had a wife,” he continued, sucking the stem of his pipe somewhat noisily, “she would have to allow anything I pleased and be glad of the privilege! A man must be master in his own house,—and a wise woman knows how to keep her place.”
She sank gracefully into a low easy-chair, with the soft movement of a bird descending into its nest, and looked up at him with a tolerantly amused air.