“You’ll please remember that I never asked you to marry me.” She laughed deliciously over the insult, and after that I could not resist her. “You have,” I said, “a bundle in your left hand, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a blue ribbon, which you sedulously keep from my sight, but of which I caught a glimpse as you entered.” “And you’ve known it all this time! Perhaps you know too what I want?” “Last spring,” I answered, “I knocked at the door of your morning-room twice, and receiving no response, I went in, to find you reading something that you instantly hid from sight. There were on the lounge, I remember, a sheet of tissue paper and a blue ribbon. I suspect a connection.” “Well?” “My theory is that you have some really improper book wrapped in the paper, and that is why you so guiltily hide it from me.” “Oh, Donald, it gives me such happiness to read it!” “That was the reason I asked you why you had tears in your eyes, when I surprised you that day. Your happiness was most enviable!” “Men never understand women!” “Deo gratias.” “But I love it.” “I don’t like to hear you express such sentiments for so erotic a book.” “Oh, don’t apply such a word to it!” she cried, in a pained voice. “A word,” I explained, “taken from the Greek _erotikos_, which is derived from _erao_, meaning ‘I love passionately.’ It is singularly descriptive, Maizie.” “If it means that, I like it, but I thought you were insulting my book.” “Almost five years ago,” I remarked, “a volume was stolen from my room, which I have never since been able to recover. Now a woman of excessive honesty calmly calls it hers.” “You know you don’t want it.” “I want it very much.” “Really?” “To put it in the fire.” “Don!” “Once upon a time a most bewitching woman wrote a story, and in a vain moment her husband asked her to give it to him. She”— “But, my darling, it was so foolish that I had to burn it up. Think of my making the heroine marry that creature!” “Since you married the poor chap to the other girl, there was no other ending possible. If the book were only in existence, I think Agnes and her husband would enjoy reading it almost as much as I should.” “How silly I was! But at least the book made you write the ending which prevented me from accepting him that winter. What a lot of trouble I gave my poor dear!” “I met the ‘poor dear’ yesterday, looking very old and unhappy despite his LL. D.” “Oh, you idiot!” she laughed. And she must like imbeciles, too, for—well, I’m not going to tell even you how I know that she’s fond of idiots. “Why do you suppose he’s unhappy?” she asked. “My theory is that he’s miserable because he lost—lost me.” “I’m so glad he is!” joyously asserted the tenderest of women. “Nevertheless,” I resumed, “it was a book I should have valued as much as you do that one in tissue paper, and you ought not to have burned it.”