With astounding irrelevance Sagner burst out laughing. "Why, Madge," he cried, "you're perfectly superb when you're mad. Keep it up. Keep it up. I didn't know you had it in you! Why, you dear, gorgeous girl--WHY AREN'T YOU MARRIED?" Like a scarlet lightning-bolt spiked with two-edged knives the red wrath of the girl descended then and there on Sagner's ugly head. With her heaving young shoulders braced like a frenzied creature at bay, against a great, silly, towering tier of "Latest Novels," she hurled her flaming, irrevocable answer crash-bang into Sagner's astonished, impertinent face. "You want to know why I'm not married?" she cried. "You want to know why I'm not married? Well, I'll tell you--why--I'm--not married, Bertus Sagner, and I'll use yourself for an illustration--for when I do come to marry, it is written in the stars that I must of necessity marry your kind, a mature, cool, calculating, emotionally-tamed man, a man of brain as well as brawn, a man of fame if not of fortune, a man bred intellectually, morally, socially, into the same wonderfully keen, thinky corner of the world where I was born--nothing but a woman. "For four years, Bertus Sagner, ever since I was nineteen years old, people have come stumbling over each other at college receptions to stare at me because I am 'the girl that Bertus Sagner, the big biologist, is _almost_ in love with.' And you _are_ 'almost' in love with me, Bertus Sagner. You can't deny it! And what is more, you will stay 'almost' in love with me till our pulses run down like clocks, and our eyes burn out like lamps, and the Real Night comes. If I remain here in this town, even when I am middle-aged--people will come and stare at me--because of you. And when I am old, and you are gone--altogether, people will still be talking about it. 'Almost in love' with me. Yes, Bertus Sagner, but if next time you came to see me, I should even so much as dally for a second on the arm of your chair, and slip my hand just a little bit tremulously into yours, and brush my lips like the ghost of a butterfly's wing across your love-starved face, you would probably find out then and there in one great, blinding, tingling, crunching flash that you LOVE ME NOW! But I don't want _you_, Bertus Sagner, nor any other man, at that price. The man who was made for me will love me first and get his petting afterward. There! Do you understand now?" As though Sagner's gasp for breath was no more than the flutter of a book-leaf, she plunged on, "And as for Mrs. Lennart--" Sagner jumped to his feet. "We weren't talking about Mrs. Lennart," he exclaimed hotly. It has always seemed to me that very few things in the world are as quick as a woman's anger. But nothing in the world, I am perfectly positive, is as quick as a woman's amusement. As though an anarchist's bomb had exploded into confetti, Madge Hubert's sudden laughter sparkled through the room.