It made her smile--which in their relation now was like the breaking of a cool air-wave over the conscious sore flush that maintained itself through his general chill. “Ah, of course you don’t allow that I _am_ literary--and of course if you’re awfully cruel and critical and incorruptible you won’t let it say for me what I so want it should!” “Where are we, where, in the name of all that’s damnably, of all that’s grotesquely delusive, are we?” he said, without a sign, to himself; which was the form of his really being quite at sea as to what she was talking about. That uncertainty indeed he could but frankly betray by taking her up, as he cast about him, on the particular ambiguity that his voice perhaps already showed him to find most irritating. “Let it show? ‘It,’ dear Princess----?” “Why, my dear man, let your Preface show, the lovely, friendly, irresistible log-rolling Preface that I’ve been asking you if you wouldn’t be an angel and write for me.” He took it in with a deep long gulp--he had never, it seemed to him, had to swallow anything so bitter. “You’ve been asking me if I wouldn’t write you a Preface?” “To ‘The Velvet Glove’--after I’ve sent it to you and you’ve judged if you really can. Of course I don’t want you to perjure yourself; but”--and she fairly brushed him again, at their close quarters, with her fresh fragrant smile--“I do want you so to like me, and to say it all out beautifully and publicly.” “You want me to like you, Princess?” “But, heaven help us, haven’t you understood?” Nothing stranger could conceivably have been, it struck him--if he was right now--than this exquisite intimacy of her manner of setting him down on the other side of an abyss. It was as if she had lifted him first in her beautiful arms, had raised him up high, high, high, to do it, pressing him to her immortal young breast while he let himself go, and then, by some extraordinary effect of her native force and her alien quality, setting him down exactly where she wanted him to be--which was a thousand miles away from her. Once more, so preposterously face to face with her for these base issues, he took it all in; after which he felt his eyes close, for amazement, despair and shame, and his head, which he had some time before, baring his brow to the mild night, eased of its crush-hat, sink to confounded rest on the upholstered back of the seat. The act, the ceasing to see, and if possible to hear, was for the moment a retreat, an escape from a state that he felt himself fairly flatter by thinking of it as “awkward”; the state of really wishing that his humiliation might end, and of wondering in fact if the most decent course open to him mightn’t be to ask her to stop the motor and let him down.