"A pretty name, too," she said. "I have wondered if I might not spoil it in my pronunciation." "You beautiful bit of mockery, you," he said, "will you condescend to repeat a little sentence after me? You will say it far more prettily than I, but perhaps you will forgive my lack of music. I am only a man. You--ah, you are a goddess." "For how long?" she asked. "Men marry goddesses and find them clay, don't they?" "You are not clay, dear, you are star-dust, and flowers, and fragrance. There is not a thought in your dear head that is in tune with mere clay. But listen! You must say this after me: I--" "I--" "Love--" "Love--" "You--" "You--" "Jeannette--" Her lips began to frame the consonant for her own name, but at sight of the pleading in his gaze she stilled the playfulness of her, and finished, shyly, but oh, so sweetly. "Orson." The dear, delightful absurdities of the hour when men and women tell each other they love, how silly, and how pathetic they must seem to the all-seeing force that flings our destinies back and forth at its will! Yet how fair, how ineffably fair, those moments are to their heroes and heroines; how vastly absurd the rest of the sad, serious world seems to such lovers, and how happy are the mortals, after all, who through fastnesses of doubt and darkness, come to the free spaces where the heart, in tenderness and grace, rules supreme over the intellect, and keeps in subjection, wisdom, ignorance and all the ills men plague their minds with! When they left the Mayfair together their precious secret was anything but a secret. Their dream lay fair and open to the world; one must have been very blind not to see how much these two were in love with each other. They had gone over every incident of their friendship; they had stirred the embers of their earliest longings; they had touched their growing happiness at every point save where Orson's steps aside had hurt his sweetheart's memory. Those periods both avoided. All else they made subject for, oh, the tenderest, the most lovelorn conversation thinkable. It was enough, if overheard, to have sickened the whole day for any ordinary mortal. One must, to repeat, have been very stupid not to see, when they issued upon the avenue, that they shared the secret that this world appears to have been created to keep alive. Love clothed them like a visible garment.