“Then be sure I’m the last!” she returned mockingly; then she laughed gayly. “Oh, rubbish! Let’s be sensible. I have a feeling that the girls in your stories are painfully stiff, and they’re a little too much alike. They’re always just coming down from Newport or Bar Harbor, and we are introduced to them as they enter their marble palaces on Fifth Avenue and ring for Walters to serve tea at once. You ought to cut out those stately, impossible queens and go in for human interest. I’ll be really brutal and say that I’m tired of having your heroine pale slightly as her lover--the one she sent to bring her an orchid known only to a cannibal tribe of the upper Amazon--appears suddenly at the door of her box at the Metropolitan, just as Wolfram strikes up his eulogy of love in Tannhauser. If one of the cannibals in his war dress should appear at the box door carrying the lover’s head in a wicker basket, that would be interesting; but for Mister Lover to come wearing the orchid in his button-hole is commonplace. Do you follow me?” She saw that he flinched. No one had ever said such things to his face before. “Oh, I know the critics praise you for your wonderful portrait gallery of women, but your girls don’t strike me as being real spontaneous American girls. Do you forgive me?” He would have forgiven her if she had told him she had poisoned his tea and that he would be a dead man in five minutes. “Perhaps,” he remarked boldly, “the fact that I never saw you until today will explain my failures!” “A little obvious!” she commented serenely. “But we’ll overlook it this time. You may smoke if you like.” She lighted a match for him and held it to the tip of his cigarette. This brought him closer to the brown eyes for an intoxicating instant. Brief as that moment was, he had detected on each side of her nose little patches of freckles that were wholly invisible across the table. He was ashamed to have seen them, but the knowledge of their presence made his heart go pitapat. His heart had always performed its physical functions with the utmost regularity, but as a center of emotions he did not know it at all. He must have a care. Arabella folded her hands on the edge of the table. “The question before us now is whether you wish to advise with me as to plots. Before you answer you will have to determine whether you can trust me. It would be foolish for us to proceed if you don’t think I can help you. On the other hand, I can’t undertake a commission unless you intrust your case to me fully. And it wouldn’t be fair for you to allow me to proceed unless you mean to go through to the end. My system is my own; I can’t afford to divulge it unless you’re willing to confide in me.”