He tried to look at it with disapproval,
while his mind dealt independently with the amazing question put to
him.

"Well, Flossie, if you really care anything about style--"

"Style?" She stroked down the front of her jacket with a delicious
movement of her little hands. "Don't you like it?"

He smiled. "I adore it. It makes you look like a dear little brown
Beaver, as you are." "The Beaver" was only one of the many names he
had for her; it was suggested irresistibly by her plumpness, her
singularly practical intelligence, and her secretive ways.

"Then what do you mean by style?" asked the Beaver in a challenging
tone that forced him to lay down his pen.

"What do I mean by style?" He explained, moved by the mad lust for
mystification which seizes a man in the presence of adorable
simplicity. "I don't mean anything in the least resembling a Beaver's
coat (there really isn't any style about a Beaver's coat). And if you
want me to say it's the clothing of your thoughts, I won't. The less
clothing they have the better. It can't be treated as a Beaver treats
its coats. You can put it on and off (I was putting it on when you
came in and interrupted me); and you can mend it, and brush it up a
bit; but you can't measure it, or make it to order, and when it wears
out you can't get another where you got the first. Style isn't the
clothing, it's the body of your thoughts, my Beaver; and in a slap-up,
A 1 style, the style of the masters, _my_ style, you can't tell the
body from the soul."

"If you'd said you couldn't tell the body from the skirt it would
sound like sense."

That remark was (for the Beaver) really so witty that he leaned back
in his chair and laughed at it. But the Beaver was in no laughing
humour. "Look here," she said, "you _say_ that if you write those
stylish things that take up such a lot of time, they only pay you less
for them."

"Well?"

"Well, is it fair of you to go on writing them?"

"Fair of _me_? My dear child, why not?"

"Be-_cause_, if I buy stylish things I _have_ to pay for them. And
I've been buying them long enough, just to please you."

"I don't follow. But I suppose a Beaver has to reason backwards;
because, you know, all its intelligence is in its tail."

"Gracious, Keith! You are a silly."

"I am not alone in my opinion. It's the opinion of some very eminent
zoologists." He drew her gently on his knee; raised her veil and
looked into her eyes. They were (as he had often h