“I shouldn’t have minded you in a business suit! Just goes to show how little you Forges understand women! But we’ll let the dinner clothes pass. Oh, Nathan! Nathan! Nathan!” The last word was almost a hysterical shriek. “Now what am I doing?” cried the thoroughly unnerved fellow. “Picking at your thumb nail!” cried Bernie. From the cold horror in her voice one might imagine Nathan had drawn the decapitated head of a child from his clothes and juggled it to amuse himself while she talked. “Excuse me,” he muttered. And he dropped his hands in his lap and looked the picture of misery. What could he do but sit quietly like a tailor’s dummy and take the hot-shot she poured into him, broadside? And she poured it. There was no doubt about it. She poured it. “Look at you!” she cried witheringly, her neurasthenia getting the upper hand. “Feet clad in rakish patent leather shoes! Dinner clothes, when you know you’re from a little tank-town anyhow and never wore dinner clothes there in your life! Necktie drawn too tight! Shirt bosom hard and smooth instead of soft and pleated! Collar two seasons out of style! Hair parted on one side instead of deftly and sophisticatedly in the middle! Ears—look at your ears!—especially your left one! Ugh! It gives me the creeps to look at it——” “It’s an injury, Bernie. I can’t help that, can I?” “Certainly you can help it! You got into the fight that made it that way, didn’t you? And if I remember aright, it was over some of your asinine poetry! But aside from getting into the fight in the first place, surely you could have submitted to a surgical operation and had it removed and put on right! And your hands! Look at your hands! Knotted and gnarled in the knuckles——” “If you’d had to do as much manual labor with your hands as I’ve had to do with mine, your hands would be knotted and gnarled in the knuckles!” “There you go! Hick again! Trying to defend yourself! Insulting a lady!” “But aren’t you insulting me a trifle, Bernie, by calling attention to the condition of my hands, which I can’t help?” “No!” Bernie’s hysteria was growing a trifle wilder. “If a man is a perfect gentleman—and perfectly bred—never mind what a lady says to him, he concedes her the privilege of insulting him as her right—because she is a lady! But what can you know about that, of course—coming from Paris!” “I don’t think a perfect lady would be cruel enough to remind a fellow of things about his appearance he can’t help.” “What do you know about perfect ladies? Where have you met any perfect ladies? Who are you, that you presume to sit there and question my knowledge of etiquette and what’s right and polite?” Nathan gave a tired laugh. He drew a long breath,—that sigh of infinite patience when called upon to hold his temper and indulge irascible, inconsistent, spoiled womanhood. “It’s true I haven’t had many social advantages, Bernie,” he conceded. “But that’s never been because I didn’t hanker for them——”