“Not so rough, not so rough! What do you mean, you’re afraid? How will this sound in your biography, that you refused a maiden’s prayer? I’ll have to take you in hand; you ought to be trained.” She reached down and gave a tug at a gravitating stocking. “No, from your face I see it’s hopeless. Well, what are you going to do to keep the ennui away?”
“I had an idea,” I remarked hopefully.
“Quick, quick! Don’t keep me in starvation.”
“In connection with the method of making up the quarrel suggested by the good Cosgrove—”
“Yes, yes, I follow you there—everything except the ‘good’—”
“Since the good Cosgrove says that the text of our play of pacification is in the library, I was thinking of having a look at it and refreshing my memory.”
“I can follow you there, too; only no refreshments here, thanks—‘Noah’s Flood’ is all news to me as a big, throbbing drammer. Sounds sort of frisky, I mean riskay, putting all those animals to bed. Who wrote it?”
“The authors of the mystery-plays are unknown.”
“Something fishy there, I’ll bet. Come on, show me this sensation.”
She grabbed a hand of mine and dragged me through the room of weapons into the spacious library, a room of irregular shape, since the curve of the staircase well rounded one wall and the huge jut of the south-west corner tower made a pocket-like projection almost equal to a separate room. A monumental mahogany break-front bookcase occupied the principal straight wall of the room, and other glass-covered stacks of shelves lined the shorter and the semicircular wall and the spaces between the windows. Altogether there must have been three thousand books.