“Then Emily broke the engagement, and Rodney, after relieving himself of more heretical opinions of spiritual simplicity and mystic madness, stalked unmelodiously away, slamming her door, and his own after it.

“What I didn’t hear of it myself, Emily told me afterward, for we are very confidential.

“The whole house was intensely interested in the denouement.  Rodney sat stolidly at his table, crunching his food, gazing reproachfully and adoringly at Emily’s proudly lifted head.  Emily, for all her unconsciousness of physical necessity, lost her appetite, and grew pale.  The mental and physical may have nothing in harmony, as she says, but certainly her mental upheaval resulting from the lack of Rodney’s demonstrations of love, affected her physical appetite as well as her complexion.

“When Rodney met Emily in the halls, he made her life miserable.

“‘Good morning, Long Sin Coo.’  ‘Hello, Ghostie.’  ’Hey, Spirit, may I borrow a nip of brandy to make an ethereal cocktail for my imaginary nightcap?’

“And he opened his transom and took to talking to himself out loud.  So Emily decided to close her transom.  It stuck.  She asked my assistance, and we balanced a chair on a box and I held it steady while she got up to oil the transom.  But first she would lose her balance, then she would drop the oil can, then the box would slip.  She couldn’t reach the joints, or whatever you call them, and when she stood on tiptoe she lost her balance.  Then she got her finger in the joint and pinched it, emitting a most material squeal as she did so.  Happening to glance through the transom, she saw Rodney standing below in the hall, grinning at her with inharmonious, unspiritual, unsentimental glee, and she tugged viciously at the transom, banging herself off the box, upsetting the chair, and squirting oil all over me as she fell.

“Rodney rushed to the rescue, but Emily was already scrambling into sitting posture, scared, bruised and furious.  She had torn her dress, twisted her ankle, bumped her head and scratched her face.  And Rodney had seen it.

“Ignoring me, Rodney sat down on the box and looked her over with cold professional eyes.

“‘My little seeker after truth,’ he said, ’you are a mystic combination of spirit and mind.  You are in tune with the infinite spheres.  You are a breath in a universal breeze.  Therefore you feel no inconvenience.  Get up, my child, and waltz an Oriental hesitation down the hall and convince yourself everlastingly that you are in truth only a mysterious unit in a universe of harmonic chords.’

“Emily dropped her head on the oil can, lifted up her voice and wept.  And Rodney, with an exclamation that a minister’s daughter can not repeat, took the unhappy mystic into his arms.

“’Sweetheart, forgive me.  I am a brute, I know.  Knock me on the head with the oil can, won’t you?  Don’t cry, sweetheart,—­Emily, don’t.’