"No, but you would make me a boy again. If old Ponce de Leon had met a
Miss Zell, he would soon have forsaken the swamps and alligators of
Florida." "Oh, what a watery, scaly compliment! Preferred to swamps
and alligators! Who would have believed it?"

"I am not blind to your pretty, wilful blindness. You know I likened
you to something too divine and precious to be found on earth."

"Which is still true in the carrying out of your marvellously mixed
metaphors. I must lend you my rhetoric book. But as your meaning dawns
on me, I see that you are symbolized by old Ponce. I shall look in the
history for the age of the ancient Spaniard to-morrow, and then I
shall know how old you are, a thing I could never find out."

As with little jets of silvery laughter and with butterfly motion she
hovered round him, the very embodiment of life and beautiful youth,
she would have made, to an artist's eye, a very true realization of
the far-famed mythical fountain.

And yet, as a moment later she confidingly took his arm and strolled
toward the library, it was evident that all her flutter and hesitancy,
her seeming freedom and mimic show of war, were like those of some
bright tropical bird fascinated by a remorseless serpent whose intent
eyes and deadly purpose are creating a spell that cannot be resisted.

Mr. Van Dam, upon whose arm she was leaning, was one of the worst
products of artificial metropolitan life. He had inherited a name
which ancestry had rendered honorable, but which he to the utmost
dishonored, and yet so adroitly, so shrewdly respecting fashion's
code, though shunning nothing wrong, that he did not lose the _entree_