“Oh, I’ve never done nothing.”

“But you’re ready to.  Oh, I don’t know.  I want—­I wish Jock Seton—­the filibuster I met in San Francisco—­I wish he were here.  Mouse, maybe I can make a filibuster of you.  I’ve got to create something.  Oh, those people!  If you just knew them!  That fool Mary Stettinius is mad about that Tchatzsky person, and her husband invites him to teas.  Stettinius is mad about Olympia, who’ll probably take Carson out and marry him, and he’ll keep on hanging about the Greek girl.  Ungh!”

“I don’t know—­I don’t know—­”

But as he didn’t know what he didn’t know she merely patted his arm and said, soothingly:  “I won’t criticize your first specimens of radicals any more.  They are trying to do something, anyway.”  Then she added, in an irrelevant tone, “You’re exactly as tall as I am.  Mouse dear, you ought to be taller.”

They were entering the drab stretch of Tavistock Place, after a silence as drab, when she exclaimed:  “Mouse, I am so sick of everything.  I want to get out, away, anywhere, and do something, anything, just so’s it’s different.  Even the country.  I’d like—­Why couldn’t we?”

“Let’s go out on a picnic to-morrow, Istra.”

“A picnic picnic?  With pickles and a pillow cushion and several kinds of cake?...  I’m afraid the Bois Boulogne has spoiled me for that....  Let me think.”

She drooped down on the steps of their house.  Her head back, her supple strong throat arched with the passion of hating boredom, she devoured the starlight dim over the stale old roofs across the way.

“Stars,” she said.  “Out on the moors they would come down by you....  What is your adventure—­your formula for it?...  Let’s see; you take common roadside things seriously; you’d be dear and excited over a Red Lion Inn.”

“Are there more than one Red Li—­”

“My dear Mouse, England is a menagerie of Red Lions and White Lions and fuzzy Green Unicorns....  Why not, why not, why not! Let’s walk to Aengusmere.  It’s a fool colony of artists and so on, up in Suffolk; but they have got some beautiful cottages, and they’re more Celt than Dublin....  Start right now; take a train to Chelmsford, say, and tramp all night.  Take a couple of days or so to get there.  Think of it!  Tramping through dawn, past English fields.  Think of it, Yankee.  And not caring what anybody in the world thinks.  Gipsies.  Shall we?”

“Wh-h-h-h-y—­” He was sure she was mad.  Tramping all night!  He couldn’t let her do this.

She sprang up.  She stared down at him in revulsion, her hands clenched.  Her voice was hostile as she demanded: 

“What?  Don’t you want to?  With me?”

He was up beside her, angry, dignified; a man.

“Look here.  You know I want to.  You’re the elegantest—­I mean you’re—­Oh, you ought to know!  Can’t you see how I feel about you?  Why, I’d rather do this than anything I ever heard of in my life.  I just don’t want to do anything that would get people to talking about you.”