The most exquisite compliment a man has ever paid to him is worded
something like this: "Well, dear, you certainly know how to make love;"
and this compliment is always the reward, not of passion however
sustained, or sentiment however refined, but of humour whimsically
fantasticating and balancing both. It is the gentle laugh, not
violating, but just humanising, that very solemn kiss; the quip that
just saves passion from toppling over the brink into bathos, that mark
the skilful lover. No lover will long be successful unless he is a
humourist too, and is able to keep the heart of love amused. A lover
should always be something of an actor as well; not, of course, for the
purpose of feigning what he does not feel, but so that he may the better
dramatise his sincerity!

Mike had therefore many advantages over those merely pretty fellows
whose rivalry he had once been modest enough to fear. He was a master
of all the child's play of love; and to attempt to describe the fancies
which he found to vary the game of love, would be to run the risk of
exposing the limitations of the literary medium. No words can pull those
whimsical faces, or put on those heart-breaking pathetic expressions,
with which he loved to meet Esther after some short absence. Sometimes
he would come into the room, a little forlorn sparrow of a creature,
signifying, by a dejection in which his very clothes took part, that he
was out in the east wind of circumstance and no one in the world cared a
shabby feather for him. He would stand shivering in a corner, and look
timorously from side to side, till at last he would pretend she had
warmed him with her kisses, and generally made him welcome to the world.

Sometimes he would come in with his collar dismally turned up, and an
old battered hat upon his head, and pretend that he hadn't had a
meal--of kisses--for a whole week; and occasionally he would come
blowing out his cheeks like a king's trumpeter, to announce that Mike
Laflin might be at any moment expected. But for the most part these
impersonations were in a minor key, as Mike had soon discovered that the
more pathetic he was, the more he was hugged and called a "weenty,"
which was one of his own sad little names for himself.

One of his "long-run" fairy-tales, as he would call them, was that each
morning as he went to business, he really started out in search of a
million pounds, which was somewhere awaiting him, and which he might
break his s