"Well, I lower the bucket, then; and if I can bring truth to the top of the well you will promise not to blush on beholding her?" "I promise." "It is maddening and unhealthy to be rich and idle. The rich and idle do such impossible things in the wild effort to pass away the dragging hours. Society is not made up of fools: rather knaves and madmen. Money and idleness result in a mild attack of insanity." "Thanks." "You are welcome. Shall I lower truth along with the butter of flattery?" "You may lower the butter of flattery. So that is how the great public looks upon us?" "Yes, in a way; while it envies you." "I have always been rich. What is poverty like?" "It is comparative." "It must be horrid." "Poverty is ugly only when man himself is the cause of it." "Another epigram. I have always been under my uncle's care,"--with the slightest droop of the lips. "Ah! His knowledge ends at the stable and begins at the table: horses and vintages. If a woman had crossed his path he would have been a great man." "Poor Uncle Dan! To him I am his favorite filly, and he has put huge sums on me to win the ducal race. Everybody says that I'm to marry the Duke of Roxclift." "And you?" I do not know why my heart sank a little as I put this question. "I? Oh, I'm going to balk at the quarter and throw the race. To-night, what would you have done in my place?" "Hailed a gentleman exactly like myself." She dallied with a rose, brushing it across her lips. "I do not know why I desire your good opinion. Perhaps it's the novelty of sitting beside a man who does not believe in flattery." "Flattery is a truth that is not true. I think you are charming, beautiful, engaging, enchanting, mystifying. I can think of no other adjectives." "If flattery is a truth that is not true, then all your pretty adjectives mean nothing." "Oh, but I do not flatter you. Men flatter homely women--homely women who are rich and easily hoodwinked. What I have offered you in the line of decorative adjectives your mirror has already told you time and time again. If I said that you were witty, scholarly, scientific, vastly and highly intellectual, not knowing you any better than I do, that would be flattery. Do you grasp the point?" "Nebulously. You are trying to say something nice." "We are getting on capitally. When I left the club to-night the wildest stretch of my fancy would not have placed me here beside you." "Yes,"--irrelevantly, "most of us are mad. Everything is so monotonous." "To-night?" "Well, not to-night." "You have not yet asked me who I am." "Then you are somebody?"--drolly. She contemplated me, speculatively as it were. I laughed. This was the most amusing and enchanting adventure I had ever had the luck to fall into. "The world thinks so," I replied to her question. "The world? What world?" "My world ... and a part of yours." "Are you one of those men who accomplish something besides novel dinners?" "So I am led to believe." "In what way?"