Free from vexation.”

“But, Alexis, darling, I’m so sorry,” she cried.

“Why? What do you mean?”

“You said it as if you meant it, as if it was the desire of your heart. I’m not a bit like that.”

They laughed and kissed. A dainty interlude.

“You’ve never really felt like that?”

“Never.”

“The idea isn’t even new,” exclaimed Olivia, with grand inversion of chronology. “Tennyson has something like it in Locksley Hall. How does it go?”

With a wrinkling of the brow she quoted:

“Then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space