"God knows. They made a mess of it anyway, those two—andante—which I suppose this mess in marble symbolises. Pity he didn't have an aunty to tell him how."
"Louis! How irreverent!" she whispered, eyes sparkling with laughter.
"Shall I try a five-minute fashionable impromptu, dear?" he asked:
"If Dante'd had an Aunty
Who ante-dated Dante
And scolded him
And tolded him
The way to win a winner,
It's a cinch or I'm a sinner,
He'd have taken Trix to dinner,
He'd have given her the eye
Of the fish about to die,
And folded her,
And moulded her
Like dough within a pie—
sallow, pallid pie—
And cooked a scheme to marry her,
And hired a hack to carry her
To stately Harlem-by-the-Bronx,
Where now the lonely taxi honks—"
"Kelly!" she gasped.
They both were laughing so that they hastened their steps, fearful of offending, and barely contrived to compose their features when making their adieux to Mrs. Hind-Willet and the Countess d'Enver.
As they walked east along Fifty-ninth Street, breathing in the fresh, sparkling evening air, she said impulsively:
"And to think, Louis, that if I had been wicked enough to marry you I'd have driven you into that kind of society—or into something genetically similar!"
His face sobered:
"You could hold your own in any society."