Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/210

198 'If,' said I, 'you die before me, I will have you buried in stays and patent-leather boots, and have a corset cut on your gravestone. You won't find corsets in heaven when you get there. You will have to migrate further south. There are plenty of them in hell. Satan invented them.'

'How shockingly you do talk!' she said. 'How so? tell me that?' I said seriously.

'You shouldn't talk in that way.'

I sat down laughing on the ottoman.

'Shall we go to the café by the Français?' I asked, 'You see, my dear, this earth is, after all, rather an odd place to live in; and we humans—or rather, we animals—are really, after all, rather odd things to be living in it; and this is all the more so on account of murder and sausages. Shall we go to the cafe by the Français?' 'How ri-diculous you are!' she said, 'very well.'

'My dear,' I said, 'shall we take a cab?'

We took a cab, and I talked like a rational (or irrational) being for the rest of the evening.

It was late when we got home again, and the concierge apparently deep in his slumbers; for we stood at the door (I pulling at the bell. Rosy seemingly tired into the quietness of an implicit acceptance of things), for over five minutes. At last we got in, and went slowly up the dark staircase together, I all at once thinking of last night's experiment till I began to laugh. Then I found we were standing in front of our own door; perhaps had been so for some time. Rosy stood with her hands muff-wise in her sleeves, and her eyes half-closed, and her pretty little head sleepily quavering downwards. I chucked her sharply under the chin. 'It's time to get up and eat sally-luns,' I declared. 'Good gracious, how you did startle me!' she said: 'What's the matter?'

I drew the latch-key out of my pocket, and, at the first shot, drove it into the key-hole, and opened the door. The ornamented, luxurious passage looked as if it were warm and almost cosy in the red light of the hanging oil lamp's little floating red core-flame.