Angela Hilary was half crying, half laughing, when she danced into the
drawing-room. The tea still stood on the low table, steam still hissed
from the kettle. But only Latham was there, alone, on the hearthrug. She
swept him a low curtsey, caught him by the shoulders and swung him into
the center of the room, whistling a ravishing melody in three-four time.
He put his arm about her gravely, and they waltzed on and on until
Barker cried, “Oh lor!” in the doorway.
“It’s all right,” Angela told her. “It’s callisthenics. Dr. Latham R-Xed
for my health. I’ve a touch of gout, Barker.” But Barker had fled
giggling.
“You’ve more than a touch of the devil,” the physician corrected her
severely. Angela giggled too at that, a sweeter, more seductive giggle
than Barker’s.
“Mein kleiner Herr Doktor!” she began sweetly. They were still standing
where they had been when Barker arrested their waltzing. Latham caught
her and shook her. “Bitte erlauben Sie! ich bin nicht eine Ihrer armen
Kranken und verbitte mir Auftreten. Jetzt sind Sie erzürnt, über nichts,
wahrhaftig nichts. Ach! die Männer, wie sind Sie dumm!” She poured out
at him. It irritated the Englishman to be chattered to in intimate
German, and Angela Hilary delighted in doing it. She had done it to him
many times more than once, and the more he squirmed the more eloquent,
the swifter grew her German. She had spoken to him in the hated language
all through an otherwise dull dinner-party, a dour Bishop on her other
side, an indignant and very bony suffragette just across the table. She
had done it at Church Parade, and at Harrods (she had dragged him out
shopping twice), in the Abbey and in the packed stalls of the Garrick.
“Hush, or I’ll make you,” he warned her now. He intended her to say,
“How?” And she knew it and smiled. But she said nothing of the
sort—but, almost gravely, “Oh! but I’m happy!”
“You look it.”
“So happy. So glad.”
“It suits you,” he said. “Do you know, I rather intend to try it
myself.”
“It?”
“Happiness.”
Angela flushed. “Shall we dance some more?” she said quickly.
Latham picked her up and put her into a chair. “Barker’s face was
enough. I prefer to avoid Mrs. Leavitt’s.”
Mrs. Hilary looked up at him wickedly. “Please, must I stay-put?”
“Must you what?”
“Insular Englishman, ‘stay-put’ is graphic American. By the way, why do
you dislike Americans so?”
“I should like you even better as a British subject,” he admitted.
Angela Hilary turned to the fire and spoke into it. “Oh, this war—this
wretched war! But, do you know, Dr. Latham,” swinging back to him—she
could not keep turned from him long—“do you know, I’ve been thinking.”
Latham smiled indulgently. “Oh! I think a great deal, a very great
deal.”
“When?”
“Well—for one thing—I think most all night—every night.”
He let the enormity pass. “And this last cogitation, of which you were
about to speak——”
“When you interrupted me rudely.”
“When I interrupted you with flaming interest. It was about our present
war, I apprehend.”
“I was thinking what a lot of good people were getting out of
it—different people such different good. I don’t suppose there’s any
one who hasn’t reaped some real benefit from it, if they’d stop and
think.”
Horace Latham shook his head slowly. “I wonder.”
“Oh, I don’t; I’m sure.”
He studied the fire flames gravely for a time. Then he sighed, shook off
the mood her words had called forth, and turned to her lightly.
“And what benefit has Mrs. Hilary reaped from the war?”
She knitted her brows, and sat very still. Suddenly her face kindled and
her lips quivered mutinously.
“I know. I’ve learned how to spell sugar.”
Latham laughed. This woman who spoke three other tongues as fluently and
probably as erratically as she did English, and whose music was such as
few amateurs and not all professionals could approach, was an atrocious
speller, and every one knew it who had ever been favored with a letter
from her. Latham had been favored with many. He had waste-paper-basketed
them at first—but of late he did not.
“I can!!” she insisted. “S-U-G-A-R. There! Sugar, color, collar, their,
reign, oh! what I’ve suffered over those words! I spent a whole day once
at school hunting for ‘sword’ in the dictionary (I do think of all the
silly books dictionaries are the silliest), and then I never found it.
Think of shoving a _w_ into sword. Who wants it? I don’t. Nobody needs
it. Silly language.”
“Which language can your high wisdomship spell the least incorrectly?”
he asked pleasantly.
“Mein werter Herr Doktor, das Buchstabiren ist mir Nebensache. Ich
sprache vier Sprachen flissend—Sie kaum im Stande sind nur eine zu
stammeln doch glauben Sie dass eine Frau ohne Fehler sei wenn sie
richtig Englisch schreibt und nur an die drei k’s denkt—wir man in
Deutschland zu sagen pflegt—Kirche, Kinder und Küche,” she said in a
torrent.
“You are ill,” he said, “I am going to prescribe for you.”
“What?” She made a wry face. “What?”
“This,” he gathered her into his arms and kissed her swiftly—and then
again—more than once.
At last she pushed him away. “It took some doing,” she told herself in
the glass that night. But to him she said gravely, “To be taken only
three times a day—after meals.”
“No fear!” Her physician cried, “To be taken again and again!” And it
was.
The chatterbox was silent and shy. But Horace Latham had a great deal to
tell her. He had only begun to say it, haltingly at first, then swifter
and swifter, man dominating and wooing his woman, when Angela cried
imploringly, “Hush!”
He thought that she heard some one coming. But it was not that. Angela
Hilary was planning her wedding-dress. He hushed at her cry, and sat
studying her face. Presently she fell to knotting and unknotting his
long fingers.
“Silk has most distinction,” she said to the fire, “and satin has its
points. Oh, yes, satin has points, but I think velvet, yes—velvet and
white fox.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded her lover.
Angela giggled.