"Of course you exist," she said penitently. "And you are very nice and polite, in your way, and you must make allowance for my not being clever. I keep telling you that all the time." "I am delighted that you are not, as you call it, clever," said Clarence with undoubted sincerity. "You lack verbal dexterity of a certain kind, because you have never associated freely with people you could be disrespectful to. But you are quite a new kind of girl, or else a survival, and I adore you for it. I never thought I was going to adore any one so much. Why, I even think it is humorous when you sit on me, and that, my dear, is a very bad symptom. In short, I am very much in love with you." Clarence had a habit of talking that way, and Joy didn't pay much attention to it. In a phrase of his own, it was like kissing over the telephone--it didn't get you anywhere, but it had a cunning sound. It has a warming feeling to think that any one is in love with you, even if you know they aren't. She said as much. But Clarence became what was, for him, sulky. Clarence had one curious thing about him: he never showed his temper at all, but you couldn't be with him ten minutes without being morally certain that he had a very bad and sullen one, which he merely kept concealed for reasons of his own. Whereas John Hewitt's temper, which undisguisedly was in existence, wasn't a thing you ever thought of excepting rather amusedly and affectionately. It was such a little-boy thing in comparison with the grown-up, responsible rest of him! It would undoubtedly appear some time this afternoon or evening. At the thought of it Joy felt her usual affectionate amusement. When it was over he would be very sorry. "You haven't told me anything about the comic opera yet," she hinted to Clarence, who had been quite silent for the last while. "Don't you want to?" "I do!" said Clarence, coming out of his muse and turning into his ordinary self. "We will sit down on the next stump or stone we see, and go into the matter thoroughly." It was a large flat stone, with a tree for Joy to lean against. They sat down on it, and Clarence pulled the libretto book out of his pocket, and they went to work. Joy knew the Gilbert and Sullivan operas from a copy of the words that had always been around the house. So there was no delay while she read the book through, as Clarence seemed to have expected. "To my mind it lies between 'Patience' and 'Iolanthe,'" said Clarence. "The 'Mikado' has been done to death, and so has 'Trial by Jury.' And 'Princess Ida' is too full of blank verse, and the men's solos are too hard."