“I have been away in Bohemia,” answered Mary, with a mystic smile.

There!  Mary has given it away.  She has spoiled my climax.  For I was to have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live.  If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.  It is a hillside that you turn your head to peer at from the windows of the Through Express.

At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness and slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her.  Instantly she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that he shrank down, sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across his leering features.  And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of great wings come upon a flock of chattering sparrows.  One had broken the paramount law of sham-Bohemia—­the law of “Laisser faire.”  The shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received.  With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the play-room of his pupils was that blow administered.  Women pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks.  Men looked at their watches.  There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it; it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling-house doors of the Heart.

With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exaggerated pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange of unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a light-hearted exit I must take leave of my Bohemian party.  Mary has robbed me of my climax; and she may go.

But I am not defeated.  Somewhere there exists a great vault miles broad and miles long—­more capacious than the champagne caves of France.  In that vault are stored the anticlimaxes that should have been tagged to all the stories that have been told in the world.  I shall cheat that vault of one deposit.

Minnie Brown, with her aunt, came from Crocusville down to the city to see the sights.  And because she had escorted me to fishless trout streams and exhibited to me open-plumbed waterfalls and broken my camera while I Julyed in her village, I must escort her to the hives containing the synthetic clover honey of town.

Especially did the custom-made Bohemia charm her.  The spaghetti wound its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her belief in the existence of commercialism in the world; she was dared and enchanted by the rugose wit that can be churned out of California claret.

But one evening I got her away from the smell of halibut and linoleum long enough to read to her the manuscript of this story, which then ended before her entrance into it.  I read it to her because I knew that all the printing-presses in the world were running to try to please her and some others.  And I asked her about it.