She tried to draw a long breath.

“I shall never get used to it,” she said.  “If we had been married a thousand years, I should always feel just like this when I see you.”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” he answered.  “I hope the very next time we meet you will say, quite in a wife’s orthodox tone:  ’My dear, I’ve been waiting twenty minutes.  Not that I mind at all; only I was afraid I must have misunderstood you.’”

“You hope?  Oh, I hope we shall never be like that.”

“Really?  Why, I enjoy the idea.  I shall enjoy saying to total strangers, ‘Ah, gentlemen, if my wife were ever on time—­’ It makes me feel so indissolubly united to you.”

“I like it best as we are now.”

“We might try different methods alternate years:  one year we could be domestic, and the next, detached, and so on.”

By this time they had discovered that they were leaning on a mummy-case, and Mathilde drew back with an exclamation.  “Poor thing!” she said.  “I suppose she once had a lover, too.”

“And very likely met him in the room of Chinese antiquities in the Temple Museum,” said Pete, and then, changing his tone, he added:  “But come along.  I want to show you a few little things which I have selected to furnish our home.  I think you’ll like them.”

Pete was always inventing games like this, and calling on her to enter in without the slightest warning.  One of them was about a fancy ball he was giving in the main hall of the Pennsylvania Station.  But this new idea, to treat the whole museum as a sort of super-department store, made her laugh in a faint, dependent way that she knew Pete liked.  She believed that such forms of play were peculiar to themselves, so she guarded them as the deepest kind of secret; for she thought, if her mother ever found out about them, she would at once conclude that the whole relation was childish.  To all other lovers Mathilde attributed a uniform seriousness.

It took them a long time to choose their house-furnishings:  there was a piece of black-and-gold lacquer; a set of painted panels; a Persian rug, swept by the tails of two haughty peacocks; some cloud-gray Chinese porcelains; a set of Du Barry vases; a crystal-and-enamel box, designed probably for some sacred purpose, but contributed by Pete as an excellent receptacle for chocolates at her bedside.  “The Boy with the Sword” for the dining-room, Ver Meer’s “Women at the Window,” the small Bonnington, and then, since Mathilde wanted the portrait of Mrs. Fitzherbert, and Wayne felt a faint weariness with the English school, a compromise was effected by the selection of Constable’s landscape of a bridge.  Wayne kept constantly repeating that he was exactly like Warren Hastings, astonished at his own moderation.  They had hardly begun, indeed, before Mathilde felt herself overcome by that peculiar exhaustion that overtakes even the robust in museums.

Wayne guided her to a little sofa in a room of gold and jade.