“Yes. I want you to give him the worst punishment you ever gave a man in your life.”
“But what’s that for?”
“He’s in love with me—he wants me—and he’s too much of a coward to marry me. And I want to see him suffer for it—as only you can make him. I want you to take him and maul him, I want you to bray him and pound him in your mortar, I want you to roll him and toss him about, to walk on him and stamp on him, to beat him to a jelly and grind him to a powder! I want you to keep it up till he’s thoroughly reduced—and then you can turn him over to me.”
“And then you will heal him?” inquired Sylvia—who had not been alarmed by this bloodthirsty discourse.
“Perhaps I will and perhaps I won’t,” said the other. “What is there in the maxims of Lady Dee about a broken heart?”
“The best way to catch a man,” quoted Sylvia, “is on the rebound!”
§ 30
I don’t know how this adventure will seem to you. To me it was atrocious; but Sylvia undertook it with a child’s delight.
“I had on a white hat with pink roses,” she said, when she told me about it; “and I could always do anything to a man when I had pink roses on. Beauregard was waiting for Harriet to go driving when I first saw him; she was upstairs, late on purpose. He said something about my looking like a rose myself—he was the most obvious of human creatures. And when he asked me to get in and sit by him, I said, ‘Harriet will be jealous.’ Of course he was charmed at the idea of Harriet’s being jealous. So he asked me to take a little drive with him, and we stayed out an hour—and by the time we got back, I had him!”
Two days later he was on his knees begging Sylvia to marry him. At which, of course, she was horrified. “Why, you’re supposed to be in love with my best friend!”