I admit it’s a move straight in the romantic direction--since after all (for I might as well make a clean breast of it) it’s dear old discredited romance that I’m most in sympathy with. I’ll send you ‘The Velvet Glove’ to-morrow, if you _can_ find half an hour for it; and then--and _then_--!” She paused as for the positive bright glory of her meaning. It could only be so extraordinary, her meaning, whatever it was, that the need in him that would--whatever it was again!--meet it most absolutely formed the syllables on his lips as: “Will you be very, _very_ kind to me?” “Ah ‘kind,’ dear Mr. Berridge? ‘Kind,’” she splendidly laughed, “is nothing to what--!” But she pulled herself up again an instant. “Well, to what I want to be! Just _see_,” she said, “how I want to be!” It was exactly, he felt, what he couldn’t _but_ see--in spite of books and publics and pen-names, in spite of the really “decadent” perversity, recalling that of the most irresponsibly insolent of the old Romans and Byzantines, that could lead a creature so formed for living and breathing her Romance, and so committed, up to the eyes, to the constant fact of her personal immersion in it and genius for it, the dreadful amateurish dance of ungrammatically scribbling it, with editions and advertisements and reviews and royalties and every other futile item: since what was more of the deep essence of throbbing intercourse itself than this very act of her having broken away from people, in the other room, to whom he was as nought, of her having, with her _crânerie_ of audacity and indifference, just turned her back on them all as soon as she had begun to miss him? What was more of it than her having forbidden them, by a sufficient curt ring of her own supremely silver tone, to attempt to check or criticise her freedom, than her having looked him up, at his distance, under all the noses he had put out of joint, so as to let them think whatever they might--not of herself (much she troubled to care!) but of the new champion to be reckoned with, the invincible young lion of the day? What was more of it in short than her having perhaps even positively snubbed for him the great mystified Sculptor and the great bewildered Dramatist, treated to this queer experience for the first time of their lives?