Meantime Elena was profoundly various. I told her once that being married to her would be the very next thing to owning a harem. And in consequence of this same mutability, it was as late as March before Elena Barry-Smith made up her mind to marry me; and I was so deliciously perturbed that the same night I wrote to tell Bettie Hamlyn all about it. I had accepted Rosalind more calmly somehow. Now I was dithyrambic; and you would never have suspected I had lived within fifty miles of Bettie for an entire two years without attempting to communicate with her, for very certainly my letter did not touch upon the fact. I was, in fine, supremely happy, and I wanted Bettie, first of all, to know of this circumstance, because my happiness had always made her happy too. The act was natural enough; only Elena telephoned, at nine the following morning, that she had altered her intention. "My regret is beyond expression," said I, politely, "I shall come for my tea at five, however." She entered upon a blurred protest. "You have already broken my heart," I said, with some severity, "and now it would appear you contemplate swindling the remainder of my anatomy out of its deserts. You are a curmudgeon." And I hung up the receiver. And my first thought was, "Oh, how gladly I would give the gold of Ormus and of Alaska just to have my letter back!" But I had mailed it, shuffling to the corner in my slippers, and without any collar on, in the hushed middle of the night, because my letter had seemed so important then. 6 "Will you not have me, lady?" I began that afternoon. "No, my lord," she demurely responded, "for I've decided it would be too much like living in my Sunday-clothes." And "I give it up. So what's the answer?" was my annotation. "Oh, I'm not making jokes to-day. Why are you so--Oh, as we used to say at school," she re-began, _"Que diable allais-tu faire dans cette galere?"_ "I was born in a vale of tears, Elena, and must take the consequences of being found in such a situation." She came to me, and her finger-tips touched my hand ever so lightly. "That is another quotation, I suppose. And it is one other reason why I mean not to marry you. Frankly, you bore me to death with your erudition; you are three-quarters in love with me, but you pay heaps less attention to what I say about anything than to what Aristotle or some other old fellow said about it. Oh, that I should have lived to be jealous of Aristotle! Indeed I am, for I have the misfortune to be hideously in love with you. You are so exactly the sort of infant I would like to adopt." "Love," I suggested, "while no longer an excuse for marriage, is at least a palliation." "Listen, dear. From the first I have liked you, but that was not very strange, because I like almost everybody; but it was strange I should have remembered you and have liked the idea of you ever since you went away that first time." "Oh, well, this once I will excuse you--"