Her way of saying it made him feel that all women were queens and all men their servitors. His idea that love-affairs ended in marriage seemed rustic and adolescent. To be seen in the company of a pretty face was all the reward a man ought to expect for limousines, late suppers, tantalized hopes and the patient devotion of an honorable passion. He couldn’t bear that Desire should class herself with the nuns of pleasure, who dole out their lure as payment, and have blocks of ice where less virtuous women have hearts. In her scornful defense of Fluffy, she seemed to be building up a case for herself. In the last extremity, when a proposal of marriage threatened, she employed a still more effective weapon. “Look here, Meester Deek, I like you most awfully and we’ve had some splendid times, but why are you stopping in America?” He would gaze into her eyes dumbly, thinking, “Now’s my chance.” His hesitancy would infect her with boldness. “If it’s for my sake, I’m not worth the trouble. I think you’d better go back to England. The _Lusitania’s_ sailing tomorrow.” Piqued by her assumed indifference, he would pretend to take her at her word: “Perhaps I had better. Would you come to see me off?” “Maybe.” “And kiss me good-by?” “If I felt like it.” “Then it’s almost worth going.” “Why don’t you?” Once he gave her a fright They were passing The International Sleeping Car Company on Fifth Avenue. “I think I will,” he said lightly. Entering, he made a reservation and paid the deposit money. During the next hour she was so sweet to him, so sad, that they raced back through the thickening night, arriving just as the last clerk was leaving, and canceled the booking. “Did you mean it?” she whispered. “Well, didn’t I?” “But do tell me,” she pleaded. “If you don’t, I shall never be at rest.” He slipped his arm into hers without rebuff. “Odd little, dear little Princess, was it likely?” After that, when in this mood of self-effacement, she would insist without fear of being taken seriously that he should sail. “If you don’t, I’ll refuse to see you ever again. But,” she would add, “that’s only if you really are stopping here on my account.” To relieve her conscience of responsibility he would lie like a corsair, bolstering up the fiction that business was his sole reason for remaining. “Then, it’s your funeral, isn’t it?” “My funeral,” he echoed solemnly. The Indian summer sank into a heap of ashes from which all heat was spent. November looked in with its thin-lipped mornings and its sudden pantherlike dusks. Still they wandered, separate and yet together, from the refuge of one day to the next, establishing shrines of habit which made them less and less dispensable to each other’s happiness. She was always darting ahead into the uncertain shadows, hiding, and springing out that she might test his gladness in having refound her.