"Adsum."
"I"m really serious."
"I never was less so."
"I should not have become your wife if I had dreamed you would be such a brute!"
"You"ll please remember that I never asked you to marry me."
She laughed deliciously over the insult, and after that I could not resist her.
"You have," I said, "a bundle in your left hand, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a blue ribbon, which you sedulously keep from my sight, but of which I caught a glimpse as you entered."
"And you"ve known it all this time! Perhaps you know too what I want?"
"Last spring," I answered, "I knocked at the door of your morning-room twice, and receiving no response, I went in, to find you reading something that you instantly hid from sight. There were on the lounge, I remember, a sheet of tissue paper and a blue ribbon. I suspect a connection."
"Well?"
"My theory is that you have some really improper book wrapped in the paper, and that is why you so guiltily hide it from me."
"Oh, Donald, it gives me such happiness to read it!"
"That was the reason I asked you why you had tears in your eyes, when I surprised you that day. Your happiness was most enviable!"
"Men never understand women!"
"Deo gratias."
"But I love it."
"I don"t like to hear you express such sentiments for so erotic a book."
"Oh, don"t apply such a word to it!" she cried, in a pained voice.
"A word," I explained, "taken from the Greek _erotikos_, which is derived from _erao_, meaning "I love pa.s.sionately." It is singularly descriptive, Maizie."
"If it means that, I like it, but I thought you were insulting my book."
"Almost five years ago," I remarked, "a volume was stolen from my room, which I have never since been able to recover. Now a woman of excessive honesty calmly calls it hers."
"You know you don"t want it."
"I want it very much."
"Really?"
"To put it in the fire."
"Don!"
"Once upon a time a most bewitching woman wrote a story, and in a vain moment her husband asked her to give it to him. She"--
"But, my darling, it was so foolish that I had to burn it up. Think of my making the heroine marry that creature!"
"Since you married the poor chap to the other girl, there was no other ending possible. If the book were only in existence, I think Agnes and her husband would enjoy reading it almost as much as I should."
"How silly I was! But at least the book made you write the ending which prevented me from accepting him that winter. What a lot of trouble I gave my poor dear!"
"I met the "poor dear" yesterday, looking very old and unhappy despite his LL. D."
"Oh, you idiot!" she laughed. And she must like imbeciles, too, for--well, I"m not going to tell even you how I know that she"s fond of idiots.
"Why do you suppose he"s unhappy?" she asked.
"My theory is that he"s miserable because he lost--lost me."
"I"m so glad he is!" joyously a.s.serted the tenderest of women.
"Nevertheless," I resumed, "it was a book I should have valued as much as you do that one in tissue paper, and you ought not to have burned it."
"I am very sorry I did, Donald, since you would really have liked it,"
she said, wistfully and sorrowfully. "I should have thought of your feelings, and not of mine."
This is a mood I cannot withstand. "Dear heart," I responded, "I have you, and all the books in the world are not worth a breath in comparison. What favor do you want me to do?"
"To write a sort of last chapter--an ending, you know--telling about--about the rest."
"Have you forgotten it?"
"I? Never! I couldn"t. But I want to have it all in the book, so that when Foster and Mai are older they can read it."
"I have no intention of sharing, even with our children, my under-the-rose idyl with the loveliest of girls. And when the children are older, they"ll be far more interested in their own heart secrets than they are in ours."
"Still, dear," she pleaded, "they may hear from others some unkind and perverted allusions to our story; for you know what foolish things were said at the time of our marriage."
"If I remember rightly, some one--was it my mother or Mr. Whitely?"--
"Both," she answered.
"--spread it abroad that I had trapped an heiress into marriage by means of an alias."
"Wasn"t it a delicious version!" she laughed merrily. "But no matter what"s ever tattled in the future, if Foster and Mai have your journal, they will always understand it."
"Maizie," I urged, "if you let those imps of mischief read of our childish doings in this old library, they"ll either finish painting the plates in Kingsborough, or burn the house down in trying to realize an Inca of Peru at the stake."
"But I won"t read them those parts," she promised; "especially if you write a nice ending, which they"ll like."