He scoffed.  “What nonsense!  Although, of course, Patricia—­”

She nodded, mischief in her brightly-colored tiny face.  “Yes, that is just your attitude, you beautiful idiot.”

“—­although, of course—­now, quite honestly, Patricia, I have occasionally wished that you would not speak of sacred and—­er, physical and sociological matters in exactly the tone in which—­well! in which you sometimes do speak of them.  It may sound old-fashioned, but I have always believed that decency is quite as important in mental affairs as it is in physical ones, and that as a consequence, a gentlewoman should always clothe her thoughts with at least the same care she accords her body.  Oh, don’t misunderstand me!  Of course it doesn’t do any harm, my dear, between us.  But outside—­you see, for people to know that you think about such things must necessarily give them a false opinion of you.”

Patricia meditated.

She said, with utter solemnity, “Anathema maranatha! oh, hell to damn! may the noses of all respectable people be turned upside down and jackasses dance eternally upon their grandmothers’ graves!”

“Patricia—!” cried a shocked colonel.

“I mean every syllable of it.  No, Rudolph; I can’t help it if the vinaigretted beauties of your boyhood were unabridged dictionaries of prudery.  You see, I know almost all the swearwords there are.  And I read the newspapers, and medical books, and even the things that boys chalk up on fences.  In consequence I am not a bit whiteminded, because if you use your mind at all it gets more or less dingy, just like using anything else.”

He could not help but laugh, much as he disapproved.  Patricia fluttered and, as a wren might have done, perched presently upon his knee.

“Rudolph, can’t you laugh more often, and not devote so much time to tracing out the genealogies of those silly people, and being so tediously beautiful and good?” she asked, and with a hint of seriousness.  “Rudolph, you don’t know how I would adore you if you would rob a church or cut somebody’s throat in an alley, and tell me all about it because you knew I wouldn’t betray you.  You are so infernally respectable in everything you do!  How did you come to bully me that day at the Library?  It seems almost as if those two were different people... doesn’t it, Rudolph?”

“My dear,” the colonel said whimsically, “I am afraid we are rather like the shepherdess and the chimney-sweep of the fable I read you very long ago.  We climbed up so far that we could see the stars, once, very long ago, Patricia, and we have come back to live upon the parlor table.  I suppose it happens to all the little china people.”

She took his meaning.  Each was aware of an odd sense of intimacy.  “Everything we have to be glad for now, Rudolph, is the rivet in grandfather’s neck.  It is rather a fiasco, isn’t it?”

“Eh, there are all sorts of rivets, Patricia.  And the thing one cannot do because one is what one is, need not be necessarily a cause for grief.”