Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/42

34 Mr. Howells's "Undiscovered Country," and had adopted the Shakers' paraphrase for love: "Feeling foolish."—"Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye, gentlemen?" she inquired, mimicking the dialect of Chalks. "Well, I guess you just ain't feeling any more foolish than you look!"—If she would but have taken us seriously! And the worst of it was that we knew she was anything but temperamentally cold. Chalks formulated the potentialities we divined in her, when he remarked, regretfully, wistfully, as he often did, "She could love like Hell." Once, in a reckless moment, he even went so far as to tell her this point-blank. "Oh, naughty Chalks!" she remonstrated, shaking her finger at him. "Do you think that's a pretty word? But—I dare say I could."

"All the same, Lord help the man you marry," Chalks continued gloomily.

"Oh, I shall never marry," Nina cried. "Because, first, I don't approve of matrimony as an institution. And then—as you say—Lord help my husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and disobedient, and exacting, and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No, I shall never marry. Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him—ah!" She placed two fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the skies.

This fragment of conversation passed in the Luxembourg Garden; and the three or four of us by whom she was accompanied glared threateningly at our mental image of that not-impossible upstart whom she might some day meet and love. We were sure, of course, that he would be a beast; we hated him not merely because he would have cut us out with her, but because he would be so distinctly our inferior, so hopelessly unworthy