"Oh yes, _words_ enough!" admitted Page, "but all about the same sort of thing. It reminds me of the seminarists in Rome, who have to use Latin for everything. They can manage predestination and vicarious atonement like a shot, but when it comes to ordering somebody to call them for the six-twenty train to Naples they're lost. Now, you can talk about your bric-à-brac in Henry-Jamesese, you can take away your neighbor's reputation by subtle suggestion, you can appreciate a fine deed of self-abnegation, if it's not too definite! I suppose a man could even make an attenuated sort of love in the lingo, but I'll be hanged if I see how anybody could order a loaf of bread," "One might do without bread, possibly?" suggested Morrison, pressing the tips of his beautiful fingers together. "By Jove," cried Page, in hearty assent, "I've a notion that lots of times they do!" This was getting nowhere. Mrs. Marshall-Smith put her hand to the helm, and addressed herself to Morrison with a plain reminder of the reason for the grotesqueness of his irritability. "Where's _Molly_ keeping herself nowadays?" she inquired. "She hasn't come over with you, to tea, for ever so long. The pergola isn't itself without her sunny head." "Molly is a grain of sand in a hurricane, nowadays," said Morrison seriously. "It seems that the exigencies of divine convention decree that a girl who is soon to be married belongs neither to herself, to her family, to her fiancé--oh, least of all to her fiancé--but heart and soul and body to a devouring horde of dressmakers and tailors and milliners and hairdressers and corsetières and petticoat specialists and jewelers and hosiery experts and--" They were all laughing at the interminable defile of words proceeding with a Spanish gravity, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith broke in, "I don't hear anything about house-furnishers." "No," said Morrison, "the house-furnisher's name is F. Morrison, and he has no show until after the wedding." "What _are_ your plans?" asked Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "Nothing very definite except the great Date. That's fixed for the twenty-first." "Oh, so soon ... less than three weeks from now!" Morrison affected to feel a note of disapproval in her voice, and said with his faint smile, "You can hardly blame me for not wishing to delay." "Oh, no _blame!_" she denied his inference. "After all it's over a month since the engagement was announced, and who knows how much longer before that you and Molly knew about it. No. I'm not one who believes in long engagements. The shorter the better."