“Nonsense!” said Stella, and selected a blue cup with dragons on it. “At any rate,” she continued, “it is very disagreeable of you to come here and prate like a death’s-head on my wedding anniversary.”
“Gracious gravy!” said I, with a fine surprise, “so it is an anniversary with you, too?” She was absorbed in the sugar-bowl. “What a coincidence!” I suggested, pleasantly.
I paused. The fire crackled. I sighed.
“You are such poor company, nowadays, even after the advantages of foreign travel,” Stella reflected. “You really ought to do something to enliven yourself.” After a little, she brightened as to the eyes, and concentrated them upon the tea-making, and ventured a suggestion. “Why not fall in love?” said Stella.
“I am,” I confided, “already in that deplorable condition.” And I ventured on sigh number two.
“I don’t mean—anything silly,” said she, untruthfully. “Why,” she continued, with a certain lack of relevance, “why not fall in love with somebody else?” Thereupon, I regret to say, her glance strayed toward the mirror. Oh, she was vain—I grant you that. But I must protest she had a perfect right to be.
“Yes,” said I, quite gravely, “that is the reason.”
“Nonsense!” said Stella, and tossed her head. She now assumed her most matronly air, and did mysterious things with a perforated silver ball. I was given to understand I had offended, by a severe compression of her lips, which, however, was not as effective as it might have been. They twitched too mutinously.
II
Stella was all in pink, with golden fripperies sparkling in unanticipated localities. Presumably the gown was tucked and ruched and appliquéd, and had been subjected to other processes past the comprehension of trousered humanity; it was certainly becoming.
I think there was an eighteenth-century flavour about it—for it smacked, somehow, of a patched, mendacious, dainty womanhood, and its artfulness was of a gallant sort that scorned to deceive. It defied you, it allured you, it conquered you at a glance. It might have been the last cry from the court of an innocent Louis Quinze. It was, in fine, inimitable; and if only I were a milliner, I would describe for you that gown in some not unbefitting fashion. As it is, you may draft the world’s modistes to dredge the dictionary, and they will fail, as ignominiously as I would do, in the attempt.
For, after all, its greatest charm was that it contained Stella, and converted Stella into a marquise—not such an one as was her sister, the Marquise d’Arlanges, but a marquise out of Watteau or of Fragonard, say. Stella in this gown seemed out of place save upon a high-backed stone bench, set in an allée of lime-trees, of course, and under a violet sky—with a sleek abbé or two for company, and with beribboned gentlemen tinkling on their mandolins about her.
I had really no choice but to regard her as an agreeable anachronism the while she chatted with me, and mixed hot water and sugar and lemon into ostensible tea. She seemed so out of place—and yet, somehow, I entertained no especial desire upon this sleety day to have her different, nor, certainly, otherwhere than in this pleasant, half-lit room, that consisted mostly of ambiguous vistas where a variety of brass bric-a-brac blinked in the firelight.
We had voted it cosier without lamps or candles, for this odorous twilight was far more companionable. Odorous, for there were a great number of pink roses about. I imagine that someone must have sent them—because there were not any daffodils obtainable, by reason of the late and nipping frost—in honour of Stella’s second wedding anniversary.
III
“Peter says you talk to everybody that way,” quoth she—almost resentfully, and after a pause.
“Oh!” said I. For it was really no affair of Peter’s. And so—
“Peter, everybody tells me, is getting fat,” I announced, presently.
Stella witheringly glanced toward the region where my waist used to be. “He isn’t!” said she, indignant.
“Quite like a pig, they assure me,” I continued, with relish. She objected to people being well-built. “His obscene bloatedness appears to be an object of general comment.”
Silence. I stirred my tea.
“Dear Peter!” said she. And then—but unless a woman of Stella’s sort is able to exercise a proper control over her countenance, she has absolutely no right to discuss her husband with his bachelor friends. It is unkind; for it causes them to feel like social outcasts and lumbering brutes and Peeping Toms. If they know the husband well, it positively awes them; for, after all, it is a bit overwhelming, this sudden glimpse of the simplicity, and the credulity, and the merciful blindness of women in certain matters. Besides, a bachelor has no business to know such things; it merely makes him envious and uncomfortable.
Accordingly, “Stella,” said I, with firmness, “if you flaunt your connubial felicity in my face like that, I shall go home.”
She was deaf to my righteous rebuke. “Peter is in Washington this week,” she went on, looking fondly into the fire. “I had planned a party to celebrate today, but he was compelled to go—business, you know. He is doing so well nowadays,” she said, after a little, “that I am quite insufferably proud of him. And I intend for him to be a great lawyer—oh, much the greatest in America. And I won’t ever be content till then.”
“H’m!” said I. “H’m” seemed fairly noncommittal.
“Sometimes,” Stella declared, irrelevantly, “I almost wish I had been born a man.”
“I wish you had been,” quoth I, in gallant wise. “There are so few really attractive men!”
Stella looked up with a smile that was half sad.
“I’m just a little butterfly-woman, aren’t I?” she asked.
“You are,” I assented, with conviction, “a butterfly out of a queen’s garden—a marvellous pink-and-gold butterfly, such as one sees only in dreams and—er—in a London pantomime. You are
