But, in recollection of any person with whom you have had intimate and tender intercourse, the preeminent feature is the big host of questions which you cannot answer, or not, at least, with certainty. …
IV
For instance: the night of the Allardyce dance, after seeing Elena home, I stepped in for a moment to get warm and have her mix me a highball. We sat for a considerable while on the long sofa in the dimly-lighted dining room, talking in whispers so as not to disturb the rest of the house: and Elena was unusually beautiful that night, and I was more than usually in love, more thanks to three of the five drinks she mixed. …
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she stated, sighing.
I did not say anything.
“Oh, well, then—! If you will just promise me,” she stipulated, “that you will never in any way refer to it afterwards—”
So I promised. … And the next day she met me, cool as the proverbial cucumber, and never once did she “refer to it afterwards,” nor did I think it wise to do so either. But the incident, however delightful, puzzled me. It puzzles me even now. …
V
In any event, she was not only beautiful but exceedingly well-to-do likewise, since her dead father and her husband also had provided for her amply; and Lichfield sniggered in consequence, and as a matter of course assumed my devotion to be of astute and mercenary origin. But I had, in this period, a variety of reasons to know that Lichfield was for once entirely in the wrong; and that what Lichfield mistook to be the begetter of, was in reality—so we will phrase it—the almost unnecessary augmenter of my infatuation. Of course I did not exactly object to her having money. …
Meantime Elena was profoundly various. I told her once that being married to her would be the very next thing to owning a harem. And in consequence of this same mutability, it was as late as March before Elena Barry-Smith made up her mind to marry me; and I was so deliciously perturbed that the same night I wrote to tell Bettie Hamlyn all about it. I had accepted Rosalind more calmly somehow. Now I was dithyrambic; and you would never have suspected I had lived within fifty miles of Bettie for an entire two years without attempting to communicate with her, for very certainly my letter did not touch upon the fact. I was, in fine, supremely happy, and I wanted Bettie, first of all, to know of this circumstance, because my happiness had always made her happy too.
The act was natural enough; only Elena telephoned, at nine the following morning, that she had altered her intention.
“My regret is beyond expression,” said I, politely, “I shall come for my tea at five, however.”
She entered upon a blurred protest. “You have already broken my heart,” I said, with some severity, “and now it would appear you contemplate swindling the remainder of my anatomy out of its deserts. You are a curmudgeon.” And I hung up the receiver.
And my first thought was, “Oh, how gladly I would give the gold of Ormus and of Alaska just to have my letter back!” But I had mailed it, shuffling to the corner in my slippers, and without any collar on, in the hushed middle of the night, because my letter had seemed so important then.
VI
“Will you not have me, lady?” I began that afternoon.
“No, my lord,” she demurely responded, “for I’ve decided it would be too much like living in my Sunday-clothes.”
And “I give it up. So what’s the answer?” was my annotation.
“Oh, I’m not making jokes today. Why are you so—Oh, as we used to say at school,” she re-began, “Que diable allais-tu faire dans cette galere?”
“I was born in a vale of tears, Elena, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation.”
She came to me, and her fingertips touched my hand ever so lightly. “That is another quotation, I suppose. And it is one other reason why I mean not to marry you. Frankly, you bore me to death with your erudition; you are three-quarters in love with me, but you pay heaps less attention to what I say about anything than to what Aristotle or some other old fellow said about it. Oh, that I should have lived to be jealous of Aristotle! Indeed I am, for I have the misfortune to be hideously in love with you. You are so exactly the sort of infant I would like to adopt.”
“Love,” I suggested, “while no longer an excuse for marriage, is at least a palliation.”
“Listen, dear. From the first I have liked you, but that was not very strange, because I like almost everybody; but it was strange I should have remembered you and have liked the idea of you ever since you went away that first time.”
“Oh, well, this once I will excuse you—”
“But it happened in this way: I had found everybody—very nice, you know—particularly the men—and the things which cannot be laughed at I had always put aside as not worth thinking about. You like to laugh, too, but I have always known—and sometimes it gets me real mad to think about it, I can tell you—that you could be in earnest if you chose, and I can’t. And that makes me a little sorry and tremendously glad, because, quite frankly, I am head over heels in love with you. That is why I don’t intend to marry you.”
And I was not a little at sea. “Oh, very well!” I pleasantly announced, “I
