"You'd hate it, wouldn't you? A prince like David Feist." "People don't talk such things till they happen. If our daughter could have the King of England and didn't want him, I'd say she should not marry the King of England. I want my girl home by me yet, anyway, for many a long day. She should be playing with her dolls instead of her mother and aunt Etta filling her up with ideas. Don't think I'm so stuck, neither, on how she runs around with my film stars." "Honest, Roody, the way you're so strict with that child it's a shame! The girl has got to have her pleasure." "Well, if she's got to have her pleasure, she should have it with young men like Feist and not with--" "There! Didn't I tell you so? Didn't I?" "Say, I don't deny if I got some day to have a son-in-law, my first choice for him would be Feist." "Roody, the two estates together in one!" "I'm surprised at you, Rosie--honest, I'm surprised. Such talk!" Mrs. Pelz took a pinch of his each cheek, tiptoeing to kiss him squarely on the lips. "Go get dressed," she said, "and I'll wait for you." "Rosie Posy," he said, clucking into his cheek with his tongue and moving away through the pink-shaded twilight. At the door to the whitely glittering bathroom she called to him again, softly; he turning. "What'll you bet, Roody, that I get my biggest wish as soon as I got the gray roadster and the Belgian check?" "Women's nonsense!" said Mr. Pelz, his voice suddenly lost in the violent plunge of water into porcelain. In a drawing-room faithful to Dunlap Brothers' exorbitant interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, a veritable forest of wrought-iron candle-trees burned dimly into a scene of Pinturicchio table, tapestry-surmounted wedding-chest, brave and hideous with _pastiglia_ work, the inevitable camp-chair of Savonarola, an Umbrian-walnut chair with lyre-shaped front, bust of Dante Alighieri in Florentine cap and ear-muffs, a Sienese mirror of the soul, sixteenth-century suit of cap-a-pie armor on gold-and-black plinth, Venetian credence with wrought-iron locks. The voiceless and invoiced immobility of the museum here, as if only the red-plush railing, the cords from across chairs, and the "Do Not Sit" warnings to the footsore had been removed. Against a chair cruel to the back with a carved coat of arms of the Lombardi family Mr. David Feist leaned lightly and wisely. If his correct-enough patent pumps ever so slightly escaped the floor, his span of shoulders left hardly an inch to be desired. There was a peninsula of rather too closely shaved but thick black hair jutted well down Mr. Feist's brow, forming what might have been bald but were merely hairless inlets on either side. Behind _pince-nez_ his eyes sparkled in points not unlike the lenses themselves. Honed to a swift, aquiline boniness of profile which cut into the shadows, there was something swiftly vigorous about even his repose.