"And aren't you strong-minded enough to be indifferent to the fact as to whether men find you interesting or the reverse?"
"Oh, dear, no! I am a very old-fashioned person, and I am proud of it. I'd even rather be an old woman than a New Woman, if I were driven to be one or the other. I'm not a bit modern, or _fin-de-siècle_; I still believe in God and Man, and all the other comfortable and antiquated beliefs."
"How nice of you! But I knew you would, though the world in general does not give you credit for anything in the shape of warmth or tenderness; it adores you, you know, but as a sort of glorious Snow-Queen, such as Kay and Gerda ran after in dear Hans Andersen."
"I am quite aware of that, and I am afraid I don't much care; though it seems a pity to have a thing and not to get the credit for it. I sympathize with those women who have such lovely hair that nobody believes that it was grown on the premises; my heart is similarly misjudged."
"Lord Stonebridge was talking to me about you and your pictures the other day, and he said you would be an ideal woman if only you had a heart."
Elisabeth shrugged her shapely shoulders. "Then you can tell him that I think he would be an ideal man if only he had a head; but you can't expect one person to possess all the virtues or all the organs; now can you?"
"Oh! do look at that woman in white muslin and forget-me-nots, with the kittenish manner," exclaimed Elisabeth; "I can't stand kittens of over fifty, can you? I have made all my friends promise that if ever they see the faintest signs of approaching kittenness in me, as I advance in years, they will have recourse without delay to the stable-bucket, which is the natural end of kittens."
"Still, women should make the world think them young as long as possible."
"But when we are kittenish we don't make the world think we are young; we only make it think that we think we are young, which is quite a different thing."
"I see," said Cecil, possessing himself of Elisabeth's fan. "Let me fan you. I am afraid you find it rather hot here, but I doubt if we could get a seat anywhere else if once we resigned this one."
"We should have to be contented with the Chiltern Hundreds, I'm afraid. Besides, I am not a bit hot; it is never too warm for me. The thing I hate most in the world is cold; it is the one thing that makes it impossible for me to talk, and I'm miserable when I'm not talking. I mean to read a paper before the Royal Society some day, to prove that the bacillus of conversation can not germinate in a temperature of less than sixty degrees."