"Centuries," I suggested, meekly. "You remember I explained about that."
She frowned,--an untrustworthy frown that was tinged with laughter. "One meets so many people! Yes, it really is frightfully warm, Colonel Grimshaw; they ought to open some of the windows."
"Er--haw--hum! Didn't see you at the Anchesters."
"No; I am usually lucky enough to be in bed with a sick headache when Mrs. Anchester entertains. Of two evils one should choose the lesser, you know."
In the manner of divers veterans Colonel Grimshaw evinced his mirth upon a scale more proper to an elephant; and relapsed, with a reassuring air of having done his duty once and for all.
"I never," she suggested, tentatively, "heard any more of your poem, about--?"
"Oh, I finished it; every magazine in the country knows it. It is poor stuff, of course, but then how could I write of Helen when Helen had disappeared?"
The lashes exhibited themselves at full length. "I looked her up," confessed their owner, guiltily, "in the encyclopaedia. It was very instructive--about sun-myths and bronzes and the growth of the epic, you know, and tree-worship and moon-goddesses. Of course"--here ensued a flush and a certain hiatus in logic,--"of course it is nonsense."
"Nonsense?" My voice sank tenderly. "Is it nonsense, Elena, that for two years I have remembered the woman whose soft body I held, for one unforgettable moment, in my arms? and nonsense that I have fought all this time against--against the temptations every man has,--that I might ask her at last--some day when she at last returned, as always I knew she would--to share a fairly decent life? and nonsense that I have dreamed, waking and sleeping, of a wondrous face I knew in Ilium first, and in old Rome, and later on in France, I think, when the Valois were kings? Well!" I sighed, after vainly racking my brain for a tenderer fragment of those two-year-old verses, "I suppose it is nonsense!"
"The salt, please," quoth she. She flashed that unforgotten broadside at me. "I believe you need it."
"Why, dear me! of course not!" said I, to Mrs. Dumby; "immorality lost the true _cachet_ about the same time that ping-pong did. Nowadays divorces are going out, you know, and divorcees are not allowed to. Quite modish women are seen in public with their husbands nowadays."