"Oh, you did?" Florence burlesqued a polite interest. "How virry considerate of you! Then, perhaps you'll try to be a gentleman enough for one simple moment to allow me to tell you my last remarks on this subject. I've said enough—"

"Oh, have you?" Herbert interrupted with violent sarcasm. "Oh, no! Say not so! Florence, say not so!"

At this, Henry Rooter loudly shouted with applausive hilarity; whereupon Herbert, rather surprised at his own effectiveness, naturally repeated his waggery.

"Say not so, Florence! Say not so! Say not so!"

"I'll tell you one thing!" his lady cousin cried, thoroughly infuriated. "I wish to make just one last simple remark that I would care to soil myself with in your respects, Mister Herbert Illingsworth Atwater and Mister Henry Rooter!"

"Oh, say not so, Florence!" they both entreated. "Say not so! Say not so!"

"I'll just simply state the simple truth," Florence announced. "In the first place, you're goin' to live to see the day when you'll come and beg me on your bented knees to have me put poems or anything I want to in your ole newspaper, but I'll just laugh at you! 'Indeed?' I'll say! 'So you come beggin' around me, do you? Ha, ha!' I'll say! 'I guess it's a little too late for that! Why, I wouldn't—'"

"Oh, say not so, Florence! Say not so!"

"'Me to allow you to have one of my poems?' I'll say, 'Much less than that!' I'll say, 'because even if I was wearing the oldest shoes I got in the world I wouldn't take the trouble to—'"

Her conclusion was drowned out. "Oh, Florence, say not so! Say not so, Florence! Say not so!"

Chapter Seventeen

*

The hateful entreaty still murmured in her resentful ears, that night, as she fell asleep; and she passed into the beginnings of a dream with her lips slightly dimpling the surface of her pillow in belated repartee. And upon waking, though it was Sunday, her first words, half slumbrous in the silence of the morning, were, "Vile Things!" Her faculties became more alert during the preparation of a toilet that was to serve not only for breakfast, but with the addition of gloves, a hat, and a blue-velvet coat, for Church and Sunday-school as well; and she planned a hundred vengeances. That is to say, her mind did not occupy itself with plots possible to make real; but rather it dabbled among those fragmentary visions that love to overlap and displace one another upon the changeful retina of the mind's eye.

In all of these pictures, wherein prevailingly she seemed to be some sort of deathly powerful Queen of Poetry, the postures assumed by the figures of Messrs. Atwater and Rooter (both in an extremity of rags) were miserably suppliant. So she soothed herself a little—but not long. Herbert, in the next pew, in church, and Henry in the next beyond that, were perfect compositions in smugness. They were cold, contented, aristocratic; and had an imperturbable understanding between themselves (even then perceptible to the sensitive Florence) that she was a nuisance now capably disposed of by their beautiful discovery of "Say not so!" Florence's feelings were unbecoming to the place and occasion.