He made pauses and filled the silence with his eyes; but she met them with a pensive examination through the prongs of her fork; and the smiles he fancied ambiguous seemed, reflected on her mouth, to be merely inane; so he was driven back upon words and impersonal allusiveness. He groaned, in explanation, over the austerity which would tie all love knots to a wedding ring; suggesting that some people were able to conceive of them apart.
“Couldn’t you?” he inquired.
She gleamed with malicious coquetry.
“Couldn’t and wouldn’t,” she said, decisively. “Love and marry and trust to luck, that’s my sentiment; but don’t marry if you can’t love; and don’t love if you can’t marry; and don’t do either——”
“Well?”
“If you think you’re going to do both.”
“Poof!” he pouted.
“Oh, no, it’s not; it’s the very sober fact. Love’s a fever, you know, and no better than most of them—contagious and malagious and infectious and—and——”
“Go on!”
“But that’s the truth; it’s carried in frocks, pretty ones; and it’s caught by touching, and it’s regular poison to breathe! Then it must be in the air, because people take it in clumps, perfect epidemics; and the best way to catch it is to let yourself get low and dumpy. When you’ve got it, the only thing to cure you is marriage—and it does generally—a ring dissolved in syrup night and morning; kind of quinine, you know; takes away the shivering and gives you a headache.”