A PROPOSAL TO CICELY

CICELY hurled a cushion across the room.

“That’s how I feel!” she said, and glared at her first-cousin once removed, Richard Spalding.

“Good Lord!” he remarked, with a proper amount of sympathy in his lazy voice.

“And you sit there—idling about in my room—laughing at me! I quite hate you, Richard!”

“Oh, I say!” he expostulated, “I wasn’t laughing—honour bright!”

Cicely looked scornful.

“I’m absolutely sick of it all. Dead sick of it.” Cicely nodded so vigorously that her brown, bobbed curls seemed to jump. “I never want to go to another dance as long as I live.”

“That’s bad,” said Spalding. “What’s brought on this sense of repletion?”

“Everything. I've been trotted ’round till I want to scream! I feel like doing something desperate.”

At that Spalding dragged himself upright and threw away his half-smoked cigarette.

“Oh, splendid, Cis! I hoped that if I waited long enough, you’d melt. When shall it be? Be a sport, now, and—”

Cicely covered her ears with her hands.

“No, no, no! I don’t want to do anything as desperate as that!”

Richard sank back again.

“Thought it was too good to be true.” He pulled a leather diary from his waistcoat pocket and proceeded, gloomily, to make an entry.

“What's that?” asked Cicely.

“Diary.”

“But what are you writing?”

“‘Friday. Proposed to Cicely. Refused.’”

In spite of herself, Cicely giggled.

“Dicky, you are idiotic! When will you give it up?”

“When we're married.”

“We’re not going to be!” Cicely’s chin went up defiantly.

“You can’t possibly tell. You never know what you may come to,” said Spalding cheerfully.

“I’ll never come to that! And now we’ve got on to that subject I may as well tell you, Richard, that that’s another of the things I am fed up with. You ask me to marry you every day of the week, and I’m—”

“No, I don’t!” Spalding was righteously indignant. “I’ve only asked you three times this week and three and a half last week. It’s down in the book, if you want to verify it.”

“Can’t you be serious for one moment? That’s one of the things I hate about you. You're too beastly flippant! You don’t do anything. My husband’ll have to be a worker!”

“He will be,” murmured Richard.

Cicely disregarded him.

“I know you think you do a lot—standing for Parliament, and—and all that sort of thing—but you’re just—flabby!”

Richard, an athlete and an amateur boxer, blew another cloud of smoke.

“Have you ever done a day’s work—hard, manual work—in your life?” demanded Cicely.

“The complete park-orator? Four years in the trenches, that’s all.”

Cicely was slightly mollified.

“I don’t count that,” she said.

“No, I didn’t think you would. What next?”

“You’re too civilised. Too drawing-roomified. I’d want to feel that I could rely on my husband—not just that he’d be a great success at any party I took him to. All you think about is clothes and racing and whether your tie’s on straight. It’s not good enough for me.”