Septimus flushed. Her lips were soft and her breath was sweet. No woman save his mother had ever kissed him. He turned and took her hands.
"Let me accept that in full payment for everything. You want me to go away happy, don't you?"
"My dear," she said, with a little catch in her voice, "if there was anything in the world I could do to make you happy, short of throwing baby to a tiger, I would do it."
Septimus took off his cap and brought his hair to its normal perpendicularity. Emmy laughed.
"Dear me! What are you going to say?"
Septimus reflected for a moment.
"If I dine off a bloater in a soup-plate in the drawing-room, or if my bed isn't made at six o'clock in the evening, and my house is a cross between a pigsty and an ironmonger's shop, nobody minds. It is only Septimus Dix's extraordinary habits. But if the woman who is my wife in the eyes of the world—"
"Yes, yes, I see," she said hurriedly. "I hadn't looked at it in that light."
"The boy is going to Cambridge," he murmured. "Then I should like him to go into Parliament. There are deuced clever fellows in Parliament. I met one in Venice two or three years ago. He knew an awful lot of things. We spent an evening together on the Grand Canal and he talked all the time most interestingly on the drainage system of Barrow-in-Furness. I wonder how fellows get to know about drains."
Emmy said: "Would it make you happy?"