"Little Evie," he said, "it does. That's the truth. You are almost everything of which I disapprove in woman. I love you." He approached and took her in his arms. "I hate you," said Evie, in a tone too conversational to be impressive. He behaved as if she had not spoken. She drew away from him, though not wholly out of the circle of his arms. "I don't think you can have understood me," she remarked coldly. "I said I hated you." "I feel more sure of you than if you had said you loved me." "Then I'll say I love you." "Yes, dear, I know you do." She sighed. "You're not a very consistent man, are you?" she said. She spoke in a tone of remote philosophy, but she leaned her forehead against his chest. When the story came out, as of course it was bound to do--for both Evie and Lisburn seemed to think they had been rather clever about the whole thing, and they told everybody--Fanny was deeply shocked. In fact, she owned that if she had been Evie's mother she would never have held up her head again. "To think," she said, "of Evie, who has always seemed so dignified and well-bred and not of this generation at all--to think that she invented the whole thing in order to attract Mr. Lisburn's attention!" "Fanny," said Aunt Georgy, "do you remember the first day you met your present husband? You twisted your ankle just so that he might have to carry you upstairs to your room. Well, my dear, you recovered entirely as soon as he had gone, and walked all over everywhere. A strange young man carried you in his arms, Fanny. If you ask me, I call the new technique more delicate and modest than the old." THE NEW STOICS Mr. Brougham stood waiting in the wings. Never before had he made a speech; never had he been upon a stage, except to sit safely with a delegation, in a row, behind the ice-water pitcher. He had a small dry patch in his throat which constant swallowing failed to improve, and the tips of his fingers kept getting cold and very distant. He was about to make a Liberty Loan speech, and he was suffering more than he had expected; but, as he kept murmuring to himself, "_Dulce et decorum est_." At twenty-eight he had volunteered among the first in the Spanish War, and it had been no fault of his that he had never got any nearer the front than Chattanooga. At forty-eight he could still speak for his country--at least he hoped he could. How absurd to be nervous! This was no time to be thinking of one's own feelings. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the palms of his hands. "Well, Mr. Brougham," said the loud bold voice of the local chairman, "shall we go on?" What was one victim more or less to him in his insatiable campaign for speakers? "By all means," answered Brougham in a tone which even in his own ears sounded like that of a total stranger.