He followed this vagrant thought for a moment, then reddened with impatience at his own folly: "What an idiot I am! I'm not the least in love with her, but I'll miss her like the devil when she marries that cub Maitland. She's a perpetual cocktail! She'd be as mad as a hornet if she knew that I never took her seriously." He laughed, and found himself wishing that he could take her in his arms, and tease her, and scold her, and make her "mad as a hornet." Again the color burned in his cheeks; he would do something else than tease her and scold her; he would most certainly kiss her. "Oh, confound it!" he said to himself, angrily; "I'm getting stale." He did _not_ want to kiss her! He only wanted to make her happy, and be himself amused. "That is the difference between now and ten years ago," he analyzed. "Kate never 'amused' me; oh, how deadly serious it all was!" He speculated about Kate quite comfortably. She was married; very likely she had half a dozen brats. Again he contrasted his feeling for Fred with that brief madness of pain, and was cheered; it was so obvious that he was merely fond of her. How could he help it--she was so honest, so unselfconscious! Besides, she was pathetic. Her harangues upon subjects of which she was (like most of mankind) profoundly ignorant, were funny, but they were touching, too, for her complacent certainties would so inevitably bring her into bruising contact with Life. "She thinks 'suffrage' a cure-all," he thought, amused and pitiful,--"and she's so desperately young!" In her efforts to reform the world, she was like some small creature buffeting the air. In fact, all this row that women were making was like beating the air. "What's it about, anyhow?" he thought. "What on earth do they want--the women?" It seemed to him, looking a little resentfully at the ease and release from certain kinds of toil that had come to women in the last two or three decades, that they had everything that reasonable creatures could possibly want. "Think how their grandmothers had to work!" he said to himself. "Now, all that these ridiculous creatures have to do is to touch a button--and men's brains do the rest." Certainly there is an enormous difference in the collective ease of existence; women don't have to make their candles, or knit their stockings, as their grandmothers did:--"yet, nowadays, they are making more fuss than all the women that ever lived, put together! What's the matter with 'em?"