“I’m very sorry, but you’ve no idea how ill I felt.  I really couldn’t have stayed on.  I heard you come in.  You weren’t alone.”

The room was pleasant with the Eau de Lubin, and Mike’s beautiful figure appealed to Frank’s artistic sense; and he noticed it in relation to the twisted oak columns of the bed.  The body, it was smooth and white as marble; and the pectoral muscles were especially beautiful when he leaned forward to wipe a lifted leg.  He turned, and the back narrowed like a leaf, and expanded in shapes as subtle.  He was really a superb animal as he stepped out of his bath.

“I wish to heavens you’d dress.  Leave off messing yourself about.  I want breakfast.  Lizzie’s waiting.  What are you putting on those clothes for?  Where are you going?”

“I am going to see Lily Young.  She wrote to me this morning saying she had her mother’s permission to ask me to come.”

“She won’t like you any better for all that scent and washing.”

“Which of these neckties do you like?”

“I don’t know....  I wish you’d be quick.  Come on!”

As he fixed his tie with a pearl pin he whistled the “Wedding March.”  Catching Frank’s eyes, he laughed and sang at the top of his voice as he went down the passage.

Lizzie was reading in one of the arm-chairs that stood by the high chimney-piece tall with tiles and blue vases.  The stiffness and glare of the red cloth in which the room was furnished, contrasted with the soft colour of the tapestry which covered one wall.  The round table shone with silver, and an agreeable smell of coffee and sausages pervaded the room.  Lizzie looked up astonished; but without giving her time to ask questions, Mike seized her and rushed her up and down.

“Let me go! let me go!” she exclaimed.  “Are you mad?”

Frank caught up his fiddle.  At last Lizzie wrenched herself from Mike.

“What do you mean? ...  Such nonsense!”

Laughing, Mike placed her in a chair, and uncovering a dish, said—­

“What shall I give you this happy day?”

“What do you mean?  I don’t like being pulled about.”

“You know what tune that is?  That’s the ‘Wedding March.’”

“Who’s going to be married?  Not you.”

“I don’t know so much about that.  At all events I am in love.  The sensation is delicious—­like an ice or a glass of Chartreuse.  Real love—­all the others were coarse passions—­I feel it here, the genuine article.  You would not believe that I could fall in love.”

“Listen to me,” said Lizzie.  “You wouldn’t talk like that if you were in love.”

“I always talk; it relieves me.  You have no idea how nice she is; so frail, so white—­a white blonde, a Seraphita.  But you haven’t read Balzac; you do not know those white women of the North. ’Plus blanche que la blanche hermine,’ etc.  So pure is she that I cannot think of kissing her without sensations of sacrilege.  My lips are not pure enough for hers.  I would I were chaste.  I never was chaste.”