It was sheer delight to sit opposite her at dinner, and quietly watch her without a word. Shall I confess that I had an exceedingly boyish vanity in thus being granted her friendship? It is almost too boyish to confess at my time of life. It was simply in the fact that she was an actress,--a real, live, famous actress, whose photographs made shop windows beautiful,--come right out of my boy's fairyland of the theatre, actually to sit eating and drinking, quite in a real way, at my side. This, no doubt, will seem pathetically naive to most modern young men, who in this respect begin where I leave off. An actress! Great heavens! an actress is the first step to a knowledge of life. Besides, actresses off the stage are either brainless or soulful, and the choice of evils is a delicate one. Well, I have never set up for a man of the world, though sometimes when I have heard the Lovelaces of the day hinting mysteriously at their secret sins or boasting of their florid gallantries, I have remembered the last verse of Suckling's "Ballad of a Wedding," which, no doubt, the reader knows as well as I, and if not, it will increase his acquaintance with our brave old poetry to look it up. "You are very beautiful to-night," I said, in one of the meditative pauses between the courses. "Thank you, kind sir," she said, making a mock courtesy; "but the compliment is made a little anxious for me by your evident implication that I didn't look so beautiful this morning. You laid such a marked emphasis on to-night." "Nay," I returned, "'for day and night are both alike to thee.' I think you would even be beautiful--well, I cannot imagine any moment or station of life you would not beautify." "I must get you to write that down, and then I'll have it framed. It would cheer me of a morning when I curl my hair," laughed Sylvia. "But you are beautiful," I continued, becoming quite impassioned. "Yes, and as good as I'm beautiful." And she was too, though perhaps the beauty occasionally predominated. When the serious business of dining was dispatched, and we were trifling with our coffee and liqueurs, my eyes, which of course had seldom left her during the whole meal, once more enfolded her little ivory and black silk body with an embrace as real as though they had been straining passionate arms; and as I thus nursed her in my eyes, I smiled involuntarily at a thought which not unnaturally occurred to me. "What is that sly smile about?" she asked. Now I had smiled to think that underneath that stately silk, around that tight little waist, was a dainty waistband bearing the legend "Sylvia Joy," No. 4, perhaps, or 5, but NOT No. 6; and a whole wonderful underworld of lace and linen and silk stockings, the counterpart of which wonders, my clairvoyant fancy laughed to think, were at the moment--so entirely unsuspected of their original owner--my delicious possessions.