"First love!" she murmured.
He tried to shake off gloom as a wet spaniel shakes off water.
"Oh, I say, Persis, buck up! Don't feel like this. You're so beautiful; you're simply ripping to-night." He laid his hand on her bare arm. She started at his touch and before she realized it gasped, "Please don't paw me."
He stared at her, aghast: "Do you hate me as much as that?"
"Oh, I don't hate you, Willie! It's myself I hate," Persis cried. "You mustn't mind me; I'm just a little blue and lonely."
He laughed gruesomely. "Bride and groom together on honeymoon, and both terribly lonely! Gad! I wonder if other married couples come to feel this way when the honeymoon turns to green cheese. And do they just bluff it through? It reminds me of that chap in Hogarth's Mariage à la Mode, where the wife is yawning and the husband is sunk back in his chair in a dismal stupor. Only he was drunk—I think I'll get drunk."
He stumbled out to find his usual nepenthe. When he came back her door was locked.
CHAPTER LVI
PERSIS sat in grim communion with her image for hours. She faintly heard her husband's tapping on her door, and calling through it at intervals in thicker and thicker speech. But it was like a far-off rumor from a street. She was in session with herself.