slender throat and the two or three tiny white feathers jutting from her high, banded coronal of tawny hair, I had never yet seen her so beautiful as now. Her loveliness thrilled me with a new enchantment. "You!" I repeated.
"Yes, I," she hurried. "Douglas, you are so wise, so calm, so reasonable; you're a mathematician, a great thinker, a man who will some day do something marvellous in science, even if you haven't really done it already. You must see perfectly just how ungenerous I have been. I don't want to go about in fineries and have idle flatteries talked to me, if it is all boring poor Floyd to the very soul. I ought to have stopped it sooner than I have. I ought never to have begun it. I want to end it now, forthwith. That's why we're not going to the opera. That's why we're going to live a much quieter and no doubt more sensible life. I won't see my husband suffer any longer." And now she slipped to my side and caught my hand in both her own, peering into my face with her blue, vividly lucent eyes. "But we've made a kind of compromise together, Floyd and I. We're both so fond of you—you know that. We were speaking of you before you came in. We didn't dismiss the carriage for the opera till you came, on that account."
"On what account?" I asked.
"Millicent," broke in Demotte at this point, "don't cling to his hand as you're doing. It won't alter matters. He'll never consent to make himself the victim of our absurd foibles."
"Yes, it will!" cried Mildred. She clasped my hand still tighter with one of her own, and loosened from it the other, raising this to my shoulder and resting it there. "Our compromise, as I choose to call it, Douglas, is that you will come and live with us. We both want you to come—we're both devotedly fond of you. I spoke to you of this before—I've told Floyd that I did. You will be immense company for both of us—you shall be our sole society, our parties, our kettledrums, our opera, our entire outside world. I'll settle down again—I'll become Millicent Hadley once more, the little prim bookworm's-daughter. Will you come, Douglas? I—I ask you as a sister." She had put one arm about my neck, now, in a clingingly infantile way that expressed the innocent eagerness of her persuasion as no other action could do. And then her face brightened into a smile whose radiance blent itself with the balm of her breath. But suddenly a laugh of roguish sweetness rippled from her lips, and, with that bird-like activity of movement all her own, she turned her face toward Demotte. "May I kiss him as a sister, Floyd?" she merrily shouted. "Perhaps he will consent to come and live with us then! May I?"
Demotte lowered his head, laughing too, and thrust both hands into his trousers' pockets. (He did so!—this decorous monster of jealousy, jealous of even women's liking of his wife, yet not jealous of mine!)
"Oh, yes," he said. "Kiss him if he will let you. But it won't make any difference. He'll never come and live with us—he'll stick to his solitude, his acids, his salts, his chemical treatises and his beloved electricity, all the same!"
Milllicent laughed again, and kissed me on either cheek, drawing away from me with a second wilder and half-frightened burst of mirth
