'It is not that my lot is low,
That bids the silent tear to flow;'
it is the cold. No, my son; no kiss now. Sydney Smith says that there is no affection beyond seventy or below twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Wait till I rise to the paternal temperature."
Mr. Blake was assistant editor of a second-class magazine, considered himself literary, and had a way of saying "we scribblers" to Mr. Andrew, which made that gentleman stiffen slightly. While the one entertained the ladies with an account of the immense amount of literary labor performed by him since breakfast, the other looked from the window and absently watched the wild wind curl itself to edge off the crest of a drift, curling it over like the petal of a tuberose, but more thinly, hanging, wavering, flake to flake, daintily and airily touching the frail crystals.
"Oh! there's to be a great Christmas at your cathedral to-morrow," Mr. Blake said to Madeleine, as they went out to dinner. "Bassoon's going to sing, and Kohn's orchestra to play. It will be worth seeing and hearing, especially at five o'clock. I mean to go if I can wake. And you?"
"Yes," Madeleine said, glancing at Mr. Andrews, who flushed a little as he nodded acquiescence.
"'Similia similibus curantur,'" he thought. "I'll go and get cured."
"They really do things of that sort well at the cathedral," said Mrs. Hayward patronizingly, seeming to pat a personified cathedral on the head as she softly touched the table with her plump white hand.
Madeleine groaned inwardly.
"Mr. Andrew," she said, "what should put me in mind of the frog that tried to swell to the size of an ox?"
Mr. Andrew found himself unable to guess.