After the return to simple, clinging things of the brief French republic and the early Empire, the fashions had been departing more and more from any respect for God’s image beneath. When Patty came down the steps in something that was rather drapery than a group of balloons, RoBards was amazed to find how human she was after all, how Grecian, somehow; how much quainter, littler, dearer. She apologized for her immodesty, but gave weariness as her excuse. “I should have fainted in my room—if you had been there,” she said, with an audacity he had never dreamed her capable of. “But where’s the profit of a swoon if you fall into the arms of another woman—and a black one at that?” “You don’t have to faint to get into my arms,” he riposted as he crushed her close. “I’ll faint if you don’t let me out of them, Mist’ RoBards,” she gasped. Then they went in to tea. She made hardly a pretence of eating. Even if she had not been trained to fast at table like a lady, she would have been too jaded with the travel. Afterward he walked with her on the narrow piazza in the rising moon, and he felt so wonderfully enriched by her possession, so intimately at home with her, that he asked her if he might smoke. “I beg you to, Mist’ RoBards,” she said; “I love the flavor of Havana.” He took from the portmanteau-like lining of his hat one of the cigars he carried there with his red silk handkerchief, his black gloves, and any other small baggage that might otherwise bulge his pockets. As he lighted it with one of the new spiral sulphur matches, he remembered that Harry Chalender had smoked much and expensively. Harry Chalender even smoked cigars on the street and in office hours, though no gentleman was supposed to do that, and it would have ruined a less secure young man financially and socially. Some of the banks would not lend money to a man eccentric enough to smoke on the street or to wear a mustache. But Harry had dared even to grow and wear a mustache down Broadway. It was to pay a bet on an election, but it shocked the more conservative. His only effeminacy was his abstention from chewing tobacco and from snuff. Patty often praised him for not spitting tobacco juice about over her skirts and carpets, as so many of the gentlemen did. She had one dress quite ruined on Broadway by a humorist’s ejaculation of such liquor. Because of Chalender, RoBards flung down his cigar and glared at it where it lay in the grass, as smouldering as his sullen jealousy, and glared back like an eye, watchful and resentful. Only a little while he was privileged to stroll his porch with his arm about Patty Jessamine’s unfortressed waist, for she tried to smuggle away a yawn under the cover of a delicious sigh, and then protested that she could not keep her eyelids open. “No wonder!” he answered, “they’re so big!”