That evening, at her home, he suddenly, just before leaving, picked up the woman, as if she were a baby, and threatened to carry her away with him.  She did not appear alarmed, at least to the extent of hysteria, though she struggled feebly, and said that somebody was a big, brutal gorilla, and that she did not propose to be snatched from the bosom of her tribe to be conveyed to some tree-top refuge, and there become a monster’s bride.

He would assert at times, and the idea was one he clung to with great persistency, that the person with him was not even of the race, but had been substituted in the cradle for a white child stolen by an Indian woman with some great wrong to avenge.  He would call her his Chippewa Changeling, and at lunch would be most solicitous as to whether or not the Wild Rose would have a little more of the chicken salad.  Would the Flying Pawn try the celery?  Some of the jelly, he felt confident, would please the palate of the Brown Dove.  Might the white hunter help her to a little more of this or that?  Only once she rebelled.  She was laughing at something he had said, and he referred to her benignantly as his Minnegiggle, which was, admittedly, an outrage.

A great fancy of these two it was to imagine themselves a couple apart from the crowd, and unversed in city ways, and just from the country.  Not from the farm would they come, but from some town of moderate size, for they prided themselves on not being altogether ignorant.  Far from it.  Was there not a city hall in Blossomville, and a high-school, and were there not social functions there?  But, of course, it was a little different in a great city, and it would be well not to mingle too recklessly with the multitude.

They would even visit the circus when one of those “aggregations” made the summer hideous, and he would buy her peanuts and observe all the conventional rules laid down for rural deportment on such occasions.  The whimsicality, the childishness of it all, gave it a charm.  They appreciated anything together.  Harlson said, one day: 

“I believe that an old proverb should be changed.  ’He laughs best who laughs last,’ is incorrect.  It should be:  ’He laughs best who laughs with some one else.’  And that is what will make us strong in life, my love.  Some trying times may come, but we shall be brave.  We’ll just look at each other, and laugh, because we shall understand.  We know.  We, somehow, comprehend together.  Don’t you see?  Of course you do, because, if you didn’t understand, what I am saying would be nonsense.”

She understood well enough.  She understood his very heart-beats.  It had grown that way.

“I am getting very much like you, I think,” she said, “and I want you to understand, sir, that I do not regret it.  I’m afraid I’m lost totally.  I’m not alarmed that it is as if your blood were in my veins.  What can a poor girl do?”

“You might as well abandon yourself,” he answered.  “What is it they do in a part of Africa, when something to last forever is intended?  I think they drink a little of another’s blood.  Could you do that?”