"I feel sure of it," Helen replied smilingly. "In fact, I should have exonerated you even without inside information of any sort. Really, I'm awfully glad you've come. Here we are, two lone dull girls, hungry to be amused. Be as chivalrous as you can in our distressing state."
"You two lone girls lonely!" retorted Mr. Wilkinson. "Ridiculous! That is certainly a fine ground on which to seek sympathy from me! I forget who it is has the proverb, 'Never pity a woman weeping or a cat in the dark.' And I am reminded of it when I look at you two. You and my fair cousin, when you have one another to talk to, are just about as much in need of sympathy as a tiger is of tea . . . Speaking of tea—" he turned to Isabel with bland inquiry in his face, after a hasty glance about the room to make sure that no ulterior preparations had been made. "I am anxious," he explained, "to see what progress has been made since last I inculcated my theories as to edibles—and detrimentals."
Isabel rose with a sigh.
"I see that I shall have to go and superintend the matter personally," she said, "for the customs of years are too strong to be utterly overcome all at once. I can only dimly conjecture Peter's dismay if he were asked to pass the Hamburger steak to Mr. Wilkinson, yet that is the shadowy future awaiting him."
With a laugh she vanished through the doorway, and the visitor seated himself solemnly across from Miss Maitland, whom he then proceeded to regard with a gloomy eye.
"It is a fearful strain on one's comic spirit to have it suddenly cooled," he said. "It makes it liable to crack, and then when you beat on it you get nothing but a dull stodgy sound. I feel that there are times when my ebullience, my wealth of genteel diablerie, my flow of jeux d'esprit astonish even myself, but those times are never the ones when my hostess says, in effect: 'Charlie, you can be such an awful idiot when you want to that I wish you'd be one now—go on, there's a dear!'—which was substantially what you said to me. I don't mind telling you that it's very upsetting."
"Oh, I'm awfully sorry," Miss Maitland replied. "I didn't mean to. I should be simply heart-broken if your spring of divertissement should ever run dry—especially if you held me in any way responsible. Charlie serious! Good heavens! And yet, on second thought, would it not have a certain piquant lure, gained from its utter strangeness, which would be simply overwhelming? Try it and see. No audience was ever more expectant."
Wilkinson's gloom melted in meditation.
"Do you know," he said thoughtfully, "that there has never been in your attitude toward me the regard and genuine respect—I may almost say the reverence—that I could wish to see there. If it were not such a perfectly horrible thing to say, I should say that you do not understand me. As it chances—though you would be surprised to learn it—there is at this moment a mighty problem working out, or trying to work out, its solution in my brain. You tell me to be serious, and since I want the advice of every one, including those whose advice is of problematic value, I will be. And who knows but when you see me engaged, or about to engage, in practical, cosmic matters, swinging them with a gigantic intellectual force, your veneration for me may develop with remarkable rapidity?"
"Who knows, indeed? Go ahead—you have my curiosity beautifully sharpened, at any rate, before a word is said."