your letting the giddy and whimsical folk perceive what a vast deal they are deprived of. Besides, I should like you to be my first conversion—a sort of bridge by which other converts may cross over into the happy land."
"You are still most kind. I believe that bridges are usually wooden. No doubt you feel that you have made a wise selection of your material. May I be allowed to venture another question?"
"Yes—if it is not too impudent."
She was watching him with her head a little on one side, now, and a smile struggling forth from her would-be serious lips. She was recollecting how much she had always liked him, and considering how much she would surely like him hereafter, in this renewal of their old half-cousinly and half-flirtatious intimacy. She was thinking what deeps of characteristic drollery slept in him—with what a quiet, funny sort of martyrdom he had borne her little girlish despotisms, before that sudden marriage had wrought so sharp a rupture of their relations, and how often he had forced her into unwilling laughter by the slow and almost sleepy humor with which he had successfully parried some of her most vigorous attacks.
"I merely wanted to ask you," he now said, "where all these extraordinary individuals are to be found."
"Ah, that is an important question, certainly," she said, with a solemn inclination—or at least the semblance of one. "I intend to collect them."
"Good gracious! You speak of them as if they were minerals or mummies that you were going to get together for a museum. I have no doubt that they will be curiosities, by the bye."
"I am afraid you will find them so."
"Are they to be imported?"
"Oh, no. That will not be necessary."
"I see; they're domestic products."
"Quite so. In this great city—filled with so much energy, so much re-action against the narrow feudalisms of Europe—I am very certain of finding them." She paused for a moment, and seemed to employ a tacit interval for the accumulation of what she next said. "I shall not be entirely unassisted in my search, either."
A cunning twinkle became manifest in the brown eyes of her listener. He drew a long breath. "Ah! now we get at the root of the matter. There's a confederate—an accomplice, so to speak."
"I prefer that you should not allude to my assistant in so rude a style. Especially as, in the first place, you have never met him, and, in the second, he is a person of the most remarkable gifts."
"Is there any objection to my asking his name? Or is it still a dark mystery?"
She laughed at this, as if she thought it highly diverting. "My dear cousin," she exclaimed, "how absurd you can be at a pinch! What on earth should make the name of Mr. Kindelon a dark mystery?"
"Um-m-m. Somebody you met abroad, then?"
"Somebody I met on the steamer, while returning."
"I see. An Englishman?"
"A gentleman of Irish birth. He has lived in New York for a number of years. He knows a great many of the intellectual people here. He has promised to help me in my efforts. He will be of great value."
Courtlandt rose. "So are your spoons, Pauline," he said rather gruffly, not at all liking the present drift of the information. "Take my advice, and lock them up when you give your first salon."
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