She made a few blunders about it, for it was work that was new to her, but they laughed them off together. It all seemed to appeal to something dormant and primitive in her, and she was happy. It was the blossoming, in her, of the belated flower of domesticity. Gazing down at the white linen and the dishes, in a moment of abstraction, she resolved within herself thereafter to give more time and attention to such things, she even inwardly decided, some day, to take a course in cooking. It was, she felt, like finding a quaint old jewel in the folds of some neglected and long-forgotten gown, a flower in some forsaken garden. "I suppose," said Cordelia dreamily, as she contemplated the results of her labors, "that the fryingpan is the oldest weapon we women have in that perpetual warfare of the elemental she against the elemental he. Did you ever think of it in that light? Can't you imagine a shock-headed creature with a stone hatchet in his hand crawling into a cave and finding a lady in a bearskin roasting a piece of bear meat, or something like that? And can't you imagine how his pagan heart went out to her at the sight?" Hartley growled, savage-like; and they both laughed. "But I suppose," she went on thoughtfully, "that out of his mumblings of delight has come what we call family love. And then do you realize, sir, that out of the way that female savage groveled and thrust that hot meat on a slab of stone before him came that beautiful thing we call courtship?" "Fine!" cried Hartley; "and evolution in a nutshell." "Yes," said Cordelia happily. "I think I'll have to use that in a book sometime." And so, from the oysters that came carefully packed in chopped ice to the French coffee which Cordelia made on Hartley's little gas-range--from a recipe which she had carefully penciled on a slip of paper--the dinner proved the daintiest and most delectable of repasts. In a burst of confidence Cordelia even admitted that it was the happiest one she had ever eaten. Then a silence fell over them, and through the drifting smoke of the cigar which she had so carefully lighted for him he noticed how unusually luminous were the widened pupils of her "semaphore eyes," and how shell-like the soft tinting of her oval and finely chiseled face. But still neither spoke, and neither seemed oppressed by the silence. It seemed so eloquent of quiet content. "What good chums we make," she said at last, musingly. They had both begun to feel during that long silence the stir of something new and momentous in the air about them. "And always shall make," he said, taking her hand across the table and holding it firmly and warmly in his own. She looked at him out of wistful and appealing eyes; she felt herself strangely touched into a new vitality--the vitality of the emerging elemental woman. A hand-clasp was the thing she had not asked for; it was the one inadequate touch she had not called for.