“No more than I can my heart,” he said firmly. “It is to be named after you.”
Heroically she gulped it down.
“Oh, how sweet it is,” she exclaimed.
“I know,” he admitted. “But as it isn’t sugar you needn’t mind. I use saccharin which is about a thousand times as sweet. And the beauty of saccharin,” he confided to the others, “is that it stays with you. When I first discovered this Crême d’Alicia as I call it, I tasted it for days.”
“It’s a perfectly divine color,” Nora remarked enthusiastically. “I’ve always dreamed of a dress exactly that shade. How did you do it?”
“Experimenting with the coal tar dyes,” he said proudly. “I’m getting rather an expert on coal tar compounds. That color was Perkins’ mauve.”
“That was more than mauve,” Nora insisted. “I’ve plenty of mauve things.”
He raised his hand. “No you don’t, Nora! You don’t get the result of my years of close study like that. I’ll make you each a present of a bottle before you go. We’ll have it with coffee every night. Mauve was the foundation upon which I built.”
“It’s a little rich for me, Mikey dear,” his wife said anxiously. “I think it will make a far better winter cordial. I’m going upstairs to see Ethel now.”
He watched her disappear and then turned to Nora and Monty with a twinkle in his eye. “I think after my labors I need a little cocktail. In France they call this the heure de l’aperitif, as Monty probably knows, and I have a private bar of my own. Don’t give me away, children.”