“Isn’t it marvellous!… God! Isn’t it wonderful!… Could anyone have imagined it!… Frank…. Frank!” she said quietly in a small stifled tone, “will you look!… Will you kindly take one look at the old girl with the dyed hair and all the thingumajigs, at the next table…. And the major!… And oh! If looks could kill! The things they are saying about us!… I’m sure they think we’re all living in sin together…. Such goings on!” she cried with a gay pretence of horror. “Such open barefaced goings on, my friends, right in the face of decent people!… Now, is that terrible or not, Monsieur Duval, I ask you!… Darling,” she said, turning to Starwick, and speaking in a tone of droll reproach, “don’t you feel a sense of guilt?… Do you intend to do the right thing by a girl or not?… Are you going to make an honest woman of me, or aren’t you?… Come on, now, darling,” she said coaxingly, bending a little towards him, “set my tortured heart at rest! Just tell me that you intend to do the right thing by me! Won’t you?” she coaxed.
“Quite!” said Starwick, his ruddy face reddening with laughter as he spoke. “But what—” the burble of gleeful and malicious laughter began to play in his throat as he spoke—“just what is the right thing?… Do you mean?—” he trembled a little with soundless laughter, and then went on in a gravely earnest but uncertain tone—“do you mean that you want to live?”—he arched his eyebrows meaningly, and then said in a tone of droll impossibly vulgar insinuation—“you know what I mean—really live, you know?”
“Frank!” she shrieked, and rocked back in her chair, covering her mouth with her fingers—“But not at all, darling,” she went on with her former ironic seriousness, “—you’re talking to an innocent maid from Boston, Mass., who doesn’t know what you mean—you beast!” she cried. “Don’t you know we Boston girls cannot begin to really live until you make an honest woman of us first?”
“In that case,” Starwick said quietly, his face reddening again with laughter, “I should think we could begin to live at once. It seems to me that another man has already taken care of making you an honest woman!”
“God!” shrieked Elinor, falling back in her chair with another burst of rich and sudden laughter. “Poor Harold!… I had forgotten him!… That’s all this place needs to make it perfect—Harold walking in right now to glare at us over the tops of his horn-rimmed spectacles—”
“Yes,” said Starwick, “and your father and mother bringing up the rear
