"You seem to have been a sort of general Humpty Dumpty for falls all your life, Duane," she said with dangerous sweetness.
"Like that immortal, I've had only one which permanently shattered me."
"Which was that, if you please?"
"The fall you took out of me."
"In other words," she said disdainfully, "you are beginning to make love to me again."
"No.... I was in love with you."
"You were in love with yourself, young man. You are on such excellent terms with yourself that you sympathise too ardently with any attractive woman who takes the least and most innocent notice of you."
He said, very much amused: "I was perfectly serious over you, Geraldine."
"The selfish always take themselves seriously."
It was she, however, who now sat there bright-eyed and unsmiling, and he was still laughing, deftly balancing his crop on one finger, and glancing at her from time to time with that glimmer of ever-latent mockery which always made her restive at first, then irritated her with an unreasoning desire to hurt him somehow. But she never seemed able to reach him.