coddling."

"Then you ought to be. But about what we were saying: then, I quite
thought old Perigal a pig for saying that about women; now, I know he's
absolutely right."

"Absolutely wrong."

"Eh!"

"Absolutely wrong. It's the other way about. It's men who're worthless,
not poor women; and they don't care what they drag us down to so long
as they get their own ends," cried Mavis.

"Nonsense!" he commented.

"I've been out in the world and have seen what goes on," retorted Mavis.

"It isn't my experience."

"Men are always in the right. No coffee, thank you."

"Sure?"

"Quite."

"No; it is not my experience," he went on. "Take the case of all the
chaps I know who've married women who played up to them. Without
exception they curse in their hearts the day they met them."

"If anything's wrong, it's owing to the husband's selfishness."

"Little Mavis--I'm going to call you that--you don't know what rot
you're talking."

"Rot is often the inconvenient common sense of other people," commented
Mavis.

"It isn't as if marriage were for a day," he went on, "or for a week,
or two years. Then, it wouldn't matter very much whom one married. But
it's for a lifetime, whether it turns out all right or whether it
don't. What?"

"I see; you'd have men choose wives as you would a house or an
umbrella," she suggested.

"People would be a jolly sight happier if they did," he replied, to
add, after looking intently at Mavis: "Though, after all, I believe I'm
talking rot. When one's love time comes, nothing else in the world
matters; every other consideration goes phut, as it should."

"Goes what?"

"Goes to blazes, then, as it should."

"As it should," echoed Mavis.

"Dear little Mavis!" smiled Windebank, "But it's big Mavis now."

He called the waiter, to give him a note with which to pay the bill.

"What wicked waste!" remarked Mavis in an undertone.

"When it's been time spent with you?"

When the bill and the change were brought, Windebank would not look at
either.

"How can you be so extravagant?" she murmured.

"When one's with you, it's a crime to think of anything else."

"What a good thing I'm leaving you!" she laughed.

He insisted on getting and helping her into her coat. As she put her
arms into the sleeves, he murmured:

"Where did you get your hair?"

"Do try and talk sense," she pleaded, not insensible to the man's
ardent admiration.

Then, with something like a sigh, she left t