“On a strictly social basis I can’t imagine myself never seeing you again. As for my business, let it go hang!”
She lifted a finger with a mockery of warning.
“No business, no more tea; no more anything! You would hardly call the doctor or the lawyer merely to talk about the scenery. And by the same token you can hardly take the time of a person in my occupation without paying for it.”
“But, Miss——”
“There you go again! Well, if you must have a name, call me Arabella! And never mind about ‘Miss-ing’ me.”
“You’re the first Arabella I’ve ever known!” he exclaimed fervidly.
“Then be sure I’m the last!” she returned mockingly; then she laughed gayly. “Oh, rubbish! Let’s be sensible. I have a feeling that the girls in your stories are painfully stiff, and they’re a little too much alike. They’re always just coming down from Newport or Bar Harbor, and we are introduced to them as they enter their marble palaces on Fifth Avenue and ring for Walters to serve tea at once. You ought to cut out those stately, impossible queens and go in for human interest. I’ll be really brutal and say that I’m tired of having your heroine pale slightly as her lover—the one she sent to bring her an orchid known only to a cannibal tribe of the upper Amazon—appears suddenly at the door of her box at the Metropolitan, just as Wolfram strikes up his eulogy of love in Tannhauser. If one of the cannibals in his war dress should appear at the box door carrying the lover’s head in a wicker basket, that would be interesting; but for Mister Lover to come wearing the orchid in his button-hole is commonplace. Do you follow me?”
She saw that he flinched. No one had ever said such things to his face before.
“Oh, I know the critics praise you for your wonderful portrait gallery of women, but your girls don’t strike me as being real spontaneous American girls. Do you forgive me?”
He would have forgiven her if she had told him she had poisoned his tea and that he would be a dead man in five minutes.