ly brushed him again, at their close quarters, with
her fresh fragrant smile--"I do want you so to like me, and to say it
all out beautifully and publicly." "You want me to like you, Princess?"
"But, heaven help us, haven't you understood?" Nothing stranger could
conceivably have been, it struck him--if he was right now--than this
exquisite intimacy of her manner of setting him down on the other side
of an abyss. It was as if she had lifted him first in her beautiful
arms, had raised him up high, high, high, to do it, pressing him to
her immortal young breast while he let himself go, and then, by some
extraordinary effect of her native force and her alien quality, setting
him down exactly where she wanted him to be--which was a thousand miles
away from her. Once more, so preposterously face to face with her for
these base issues, he took it all in; after which he felt his eyes
close, for amazement, despair and shame, and his head, which he had some
time before, baring his brow to the mild night, eased of its crush-hat,
sink to confounded rest on the upholstered back of the seat. The act,
the ceasing to see, and if possible to hear, was for the moment a
retreat, an escape from a state that he felt himself fairly flatter
by thinking of it as "awkward"; the state of really wishing that his
humiliation might end, and of wondering in fact if the most decent
course open to him mightn't be to ask her to stop the motor and let him
down.

He spoke no word for a long minute, or for considerably more than that;
during which time the motor went and went, now even somewhat faster,
and he knew, through his closed eyes, that the outer lights had begun to
multiply and that they were getting back somewhere into the spacious and
decorative quarters. He knew this, and also that his retreat, for all
his attitude as of accommodating thought, his air--_that_ presently
and quickly came to him--of having perhaps gathered himself in, for
an instant, at her behest, to turn over, in his high ingenuity, some
humbugging "rotten" phrase or formula that he might place at her service
and make the note of such an effort; he became aware, I say, that
his lapse was but a half-retreat, with her strenuous presence and
her earnest pressure and the close cool respiration of her good faith
absolutely timing the moments of his stillness and the progress of the
car. Yes, it was wondrous well, he had all but made the biggest of
all fools of himself, almost as bi