"Oh, Harry—! Who began being insulting? Not that I mind your insulting me...."
"Oh. That's the way it is, is it? I see." They were now standing talking at the foot of Madge's front steps. Harry continued, very quietly: "Now perhaps you'd better give me back that song."
"I don't see the necessity."
"I'll be damned if you shall sing it now!" His voice remained low, but passion sounded in it as unmistakably as if he had shouted. The remark was, in fact, made in an uncontrollable burst of anger, necessitating the severing of all diplomatic relations.
"Just as you like, of course." Madge's tone, cold, expressionless, hopelessly polite, is equivalent to the granting of a demanded passport. "Here it is. Good-night."
"Good-night."
So they parted, in a white heat of anger. But being both fairly sensible people, in the main, beside being the kind of people whose anger however violently it may burn at first, does not last long, they realized before sleep closed their eyes that night that the quarrel would not last over another day.
Morning brought to Harry, at any rate, a complete return of sanity, and before breakfast he sat down and wrote the following note:
Dear Madge:
I send back the song merely as a token of the abjectness of my submission—I don't suppose you will want to sing it now. I can't tell you how sorry I am about my behavior last night; I can only ask you to attribute as much, of it as possible to the fatigue of business and forgive the rest!
Harry.
which he enclosed in an envelope with the words of the song and sent to Madge by a messenger boy.