"If only I could!"
A little farther she checked her horse, whose trunk was heaving like a bellows. It was in a little colonnade of trees with an arched roof of green leaves in more than Gothic confusion. Birds were everywhere, fluting, fighting, and building.
"Listen to them, Harvey," Persis murmured, with a kind of sad joy, as he reined in alongside. "It's their courtship-time, too. And the male bird is the better dressed of the two."
Forbes noted how sweet her throat was as it arched back; and the under surface of her chin, how beautiful. They were no longer his to admire, and bitterness came into his heart. His smile was close to a sneer as he said:
"The males put on their Sunday best and pour out their finest songs, and the lady bird chooses, they say, the one that wears the best clothes."
She gave him a look that was both rebuking and rebuked, and urged her horse along. But a little later her response to beauty filled her again with the contentment of repletion, and she checked her horse by the marble-walled pool, whose surface was broken and circled here and there by gleaming red fish with lacy fins and tails; they were darting and leaping in acrobatic ecstasies.
"They're making love, too, I suppose," Persis said, a trifle anxiously.
And he was still aggrieved enough to answer: "And the fish ladies also select the gentleman with the most gold."
She stared at him a moment, hurt and shamed. Then she flung back at him:
"Then you oughtn't to blame us—us other females for making the wisest choice we can. It must be a law of nature."