“Afterward, when they are gone, come back here and tidy up.”
“Perfectly, monsieur le comte.”
But now Barouffski had turned, he was entering the house. The man stuck his tongue out at him. “Canaille, va!” he muttered. Raising his arms, he added: “Tidy up, eh? Tidy up what? The remains of your conversation, no doubt. Bah! That won’t be much.” He laughed, took first the table, then the chairs, vanished with them and reappeared.
A bell at the gate had sounded, he hurried there and bowing, admitted Aurelia and that young person’s young man.
The girl made straight for the kennels. “Parsnips!” she delightedly exclaimed. “Aren’t those two big brutes simply dear?”
Swiftly Emmanuel intervened. “Pardon, they are very savage.” Then, as the girl hesitated he added: “Will mademoiselle give herself the trouble to pass into the salon?”
Aurelia tossed her pretty head. “No, I like it here. Besides I hate suggestions. Tell Madame Barouffska that I have come on a most unimportant matter which will probably detain me a very long time.”
“Yes,” her companion rejoined as the footman retreated. “Yes, I often think that it is only unimportant matters that are really momentous.” In his hand was a stick which negligently he twirled. “What is this one, if I may ask?”
“I have forgotten.”
“Perhaps then it was really important.”
Aurelia, who, with her delicious face and delicate garments, looked like a wayward angel, lifted a finger.
“So it was! So it was! I remember now I wanted to ask her how she likes matrimony.”
“Caesar!” the youth exclaimed. “You are not collecting data on the subject, are you?”
Meekly, with a treacherously innocent air, the girl surveyed him. “You wouldn’t wish me to take leaps in the dark, would you?”
“Certainly I would. Certainly I do—since you are to take them with me.”
With the same wicked look, Aurelia moistened her lips. “What a beautiful nature you have!”
Pleased at this, the little lord nodded.
“I’ll tell you what matrimony is, two souls with but a single thought—”
“Yes,” Aurelia interrupted. “Two souls with half a thought apiece.” Rapturously she sighed. “There is real bliss!”
Buttercups snarled. “Oh come, now! If you turn everything into ridicule—”
Dreamily Aurelia continued. “I asked the duchess, and she said—”
“The old harridan!”
“You know her manner”—a manner which Aurelia instantly made her own. “My dear, matrimony is three months of adoration, three months of introspection, thirty years of toleration—with the children to begin it all over.”
Buttercups frowned. “A rather voluminous definition.”
“Rather luminous, I should call it.”
Frowning still, Buttercups threw out.
“While you were at it, it’s a pity you did not ask her what love is.”
But the sarcasm, if sarcasm it were, convulsed Aurelia. “Parsnips!” she delightedly exclaimed. “You’ll never believe it! She asked me!”
“Mistook you for an expert,” Buttercups, glowering at the beautiful, laughing girl snapped back. “What did you say?”
Aurelia, her eyes sparkling, her little white teeth visible, her little pink tongue also, looked about her, turned, went to the bench, got up on it and there, solemnly now as though on a platform, coughed.
“I said, that while from studies and statistics I was inclined to believe that, theoretically, love is a fermentation of the molecules of the imagination, actually it is the affection of somebody else.”
Blankly Buttercups stared. “I don’t understand that.”
Aurelia coughed again. “I added that from the same studies and statistics I was also inclined to believe that love is the tragedy of those who lack it, the boredom of those who don’t.”
“Eh?” Buttercups whined. “I don’t understand that either.”
“I further stated that love is a specific emotion, more or less exclusive in selection, more—or less—permanent in duration and due to a mental disturbance, in itself caused by a law of attraction which somebody or other said was the myth of happiness, invented by the devil for man’s despair.”
Helplessly Buttercups groaned. “I don’t understand that at all.”
With birdlike ease Aurelia hopped from the bench and with consoling delicacy nodded:
“Violet said she didn’t either.”
Buttercups brightened. “Now there’s a woman of sense.”
Very sweetly Aurelia nodded again. “Leilah Barouffska said she did understand, so I may suppose that she is stupid.”
At the shot—which missed him—Buttercups tormented the tip of his nose.
“No doubt, she does seem to have made a mess of things. Why now did she leave her first husband?”
Aurelia looked down and away.
“It is not a thing I could mention.”
Buttercups gave a little jump. “What?”
Perversely, her lovely eyes still lowered, Aurelia added:
“She caught him in the act.”
Buttercups jumped again.
Aurelia blushed or rather appeared to do so. “With her own eyes she saw him eating fish with his knife.”
But Buttercups had rallied. “Now, Aurelia,” he protested, “I have heard too many lies about myself, too many confounded lies, to believe any such story.”
Superciliously, her delicate nose in the air, Aurelia looked him over. “Ah, indeed! But then you see sensible people never object to the lies that are told about them. What we do object to is the truth. Now when we are married—if we ever are—”
“Aurelia,” the poor devil pathetically interrupted, “you never say when we are married without adding if we ever are!”
“That’s to teach you not to take things for granted. I have been engaged before—and may be again.”
“B-before!” the flustered Buttercups stuttered. “A-again!”
Frostily this ingénue considered the youth. “Parsnips, don’t look at me in that fashion, you inflame me.”
She cocked an ear. “What’s that?”
At the gate the bell was ringing and unperceived by either Emmanuel had reappeared. The footman was descending the garden. Midway he stopped.
“I have the honour to inform mademoiselle that madame la comtesse is momentarily awaited.”
He bowed, moved on, opened the gate through which then a brief procession passed:—Silverstairs, a green bag under his arm; de Fresnoy, a stick under his; an old man with a small valise; finally Verplank.
Verplank, raising his hat, approached Aurelia. De Fresnoy, after saluting the young woman, addressed the old man.
But Silverstairs, sidling up to Buttercups and indicating Aurelia, whispered:
“Get her away, there’s to be a fight.”
“The deuce there is!” Buttercups exclaimed.
For a moment he looked helplessly about and made a little futile gesture. “If I ask
