"Don't think I'm conceited, but I know it."
"I feel like telling you--"
"I'll say it for you. Close your ears till I'm done." After a pause:
"I've insulted myself. I love you all the more for it! Grace, you must
be brave! If you survive this next week--"
"My God!" she said, invoking divine aid for the first time since they
moved to Fifth Avenue, thinking of what the newspapers could say.
"He's with us, sweetheart," Hendrik assured her. "Are you an
Episcopalian?"
"Yes!" she replied before she could think of not answering.
"Good! I love you. Wait!"
His voice as he entreated her to wait rang with such anguish that she
irrepressibly asked, "What?"
"_I love you!_"
He left the telephone and gathered together sixty-eight clippings, which
he put in an envelope. He went to a fashionable florist, opened an
account, and ordered some exquisite flowers. They were going to ask for
financial references, but the flowers he ordered were so expensive that
they felt ashamed of their own distrust. He stopped at Valiquet's, where
they hated him so much that they respected him, bought a wonderful gold
vanity-box, inside of which he sent a card. On the card he wrote:
_More than ever!_