"More fools they," Poppy answered, with a fine disregard of grammar. "But all that's over now. You know it's over. All the same I can't be altogether sorry it was so, because it gives me my chance.--Sit down; I'll expound to you. Let us talk.--You see, my beautiful innocent, with most men worth knowing--I am not talking about boys running about with the shell still on their heads and more affections to place than they can find a market for, but men. Well then, with most all of them, when one comes to discuss matters, one finds one's had such an awful lot of predecessors. At best one comes in a bad third--more often a bad three-and-twentieth--I mean nothing risky. Don't be nervous. But they have romantic memories of half-a-dozen women. And so, though they are no end nice and kind to one, play up and give one a good time and have a jolly good one themselves--trust 'em to take care of that--one knows all the while, if one knows anything, that the whole show's merely a _réchauffé_. Visions of Clara and Gladys, and dear little Emily, and Rosina, and Beatrice, and the lovely Lucinda--angels, every one of them, if you haven't seen them for ten years, and wouldn't know them again if you met them in the street--haunt the background of every man's mind by the time he's five-and-thirty, and cut entrancing capers against the sky-line, so that--when one comes to thrash the matter out--one finds the actually present woman, here in the foreground, hasn't really any look-in at all." Poppy threw her head back against the yellowish red cushions of the settee, her teeth showing white as she laughed. "Boys aren't worth having. They're too crude, too callow. Moreover, it isn't playing the game. One doesn't want to make a mess of their futures, poor little chaps. And grown men, except as I say of the very preëngaged sort, are not to be had. So don't you understand, most delightful lunatic, how it comes to pass that you and your friendship are precious to me beyond words? When you go I could cry. When you come I could dance." Her tone changed, becoming defiant, almost fierce. "And it is all right," she said, "thank heaven, right,--right, clean, and honest, and good for one's soul. Now I've done. Only we are very happy in our own quaint way, aren't we? And we can leave it at that. Oh, yes, we can very well leave it at that if"--she looked sideways at Mr. Iglesias, her expression half-humorous, half-pathetic--"if only it will stay at that and not play the mischief and scuttle off into something quite else." She got up quickly, with a little air of daring and bravado. "I must move about. I must do something--there, I'll make up the fire. No, sit still, dear man"--as Dominic prepared to rise also--"I like doing little odd jobs with you here. It takes off the company feeling, and makes it seem as if you belonged, and like the bicycle, had 'come to stay.'"