"Oh--I'm not to send it back till I know--" "How long," said the young authority, at once completely conscious of the supreme inanity of the proceedings, and finding them enjoyable enough, "how long do you allow yourself to find out?" "That isn't easy to tell.... Do you know you're the strangest man!" "Am I? How do I seem so strange to you?" The little hand was warm, not unpleasant to retain. The eyes, gazing up at him, were liquid and bright; they were woman's eyes. "Consider me," they seemed to say. "Am I not sweet, desirable? Am I not worthy to be held dear? Was I not made to delight? See, I am Woman, beside you...." "Oh," said the soft voice, "the way you do. Cousin Mary says you're the new sort of man, that isn't interested in girls at all. You're too clever to care anything about them. Are you?" "Clever? I'd call that the stupidest thing in the world." "Then you do like them! I'm so glad. I've wondered, you see...." The feminine speeches, the appeal of these eyes, seemed all at once to create an enveloping pressure, softer than nothing, yet extraordinary. Or possibly the trouble was that Dionysius, after all, had freed his eyes of the magic more brilliantly than his creator. "What sort of girls do you like? Tell me?" said the voice of Woman, nearer. And then in the suddenest way conceivable there took place the Strange Occurrence referred to. Without the smallest premeditation, Charles bent and touched his lips to that smooth invitational cheek. On that central point there is not the slightest room for doubt. Let there be no wriggling or evasion here. Charles Garrott, who scorned La Femme and viewed Woman exclusively as a Movement, did bend his neck and kiss the Mitchellton Home-Maker upon a sofa. He meant the salute, he was afterward certain, as but a fatherly tribute to youth and beauty, or (considered in another way) but the expected, and in a sense purely conventional, move in the ancient parlor-game. But on such a move as this homes have been broken, families set to mutual slaughter, thrones shaken, history changed. Charles, to put it in a word, found it easier to begin paying his tributes than gracefully to desist from them. Prompted by a not unnatural curiosity, the lady (who had not proved more than maidenly surprised or rebuking) said:-- "Oh!... Why do you do this?" [Illustration: "OH!... WHY DO YOU DO THIS?"] Who knows what trusting heart first voiced that immemorial question? Charles Garrott, at least, was not the first gentleman on earth to fail to utter promptly the one satisfactory commentary on his behavior. Miss Angela made that little, gentle note of interrogation which cannot be written, and then she said again:-- "Tell me--why do you?"