when one of us ventured to sigh to her of his passion! The way she
would lift her eyebrows, and gaze at you with a travesty of pity,
shaking her head pensively, and murmuring, 'Mon pauvre ami! Only
fancy!' And then how the imp, lurking in the corners of her eyes, with
only the barest pretence of trying to conceal himself, would suddenly
leap forth in a peal of laughter! She had lately read Mr. Howells's
'Undiscovered Country,' and had adopted the Shakers' paraphrase for
love: 'Feeling foolish.'--'Feeling pretty foolish to-day, air ye,
gentlemen?' she inquired, mimicking the dialect of Chalks. 'Well, I
guess you just ain't feeling any more foolish than you look.'--If she
would but have taken us seriously! And the worst of it was that we
knew she was anything but temperamentally cold. Chalks formulated the
potentialities we divined in her, when he remarked, regretfully,
wistfully, as he often did, 'She could love like Hell.' Once, in a
reckless moment, he even went so far as to tell her this pointblank.
'Oh, naughty Chalks!' she remonstrated, shaking her finger at him. 'Do
you think that's a pretty word? But--I dare say I could.'

'All the same, Lord help the man you marry,' Chalks continued
gloomily.

'Oh, I shall never marry,' Nina cried. 'Because, first, I don't
approve of matrimony as an institution. And then--as you say--Lord
help my husband. I should be such an uncomfortable wife. So
capricious, and flighty, and tantalising, and unsettling, and
disobedient, and exacting, and everything. Oh, but a horrid wife! No,
I shall never marry. Marriage is quite too out-of-date. I shan't
marry; but, if I ever meet a man and love him--ah!' She placed two
fingers upon her lips, and kissed them, and waved the kiss to the
skies.