"Poor Mr. Van Dyne. If you'd been civil to him he might have asked you to the dance to-night—if I had suggested it. But you were horridly rude."
"I? Rude?"
"You're not going to be rude enough to say it was I who behaved badly to him, are you? Oh, the shocking vanity of man! No doubt you are thinking that it was I who, serpent-like, whispered temptation into your innocent ear, and drew you away into a corner, and shoved palms in front of us, and brought silver and fine linen, and rare fruits and sparkling wines; and paid shameless court with an intelligent weather-eye always on the watch for a flouted and justly indignant cavalier!"
"Yes," he said, "you did all those things. And now you're trying to evade the results."
"What are the results?"
"A partly demented young man clamouring to see you at high-noon while the cold cruel cause of his lunacy looks on and laughs."
"I'm afraid that young man must continue to clamour," she said, immensely amused at the picture he drew. "How far away is he at this moment?"
"In the Legation, a blithering wreck."
"Why not in his office frantically immersed in vast business enterprises and cataclysmic speculations?"
"I'm rather afraid that if business immerses him too completely he will be found drowned some day."