"Certainly the one conversation that I had with him interested me--I told you so returning in the carriage. Has he never succeeded in interesting you, Ella? He told me that you were his friend--I believe he said his dearest friend."
"And I believe that he told you the truth," said Ella. "But, being his best friend and a woman, I refrain from constituting myself his champion. You see we live in Philistia, my Phyllis, and the champions that Philistia sends forth usually come to grief; there was the case of one Goliath of Gath, for example. I have no desire to have stones slung at me by the chosen people."
"I'm not quite sure that I understand you," said Phyllis, with a very pretty pucker on her forehead. "You don't mean to say that a woman should not do her best for a man whom she knows to be maligned? You don't suggest that she should stand silently to one side while people are saying what's false about him?"
"I say that it's unwise in Philistia; though I admit that it is of the greatest advantage to the man, for people at once cease maligning him and take to maligning her."
"If she is any sort of a woman she will not mind that, however unjust it may be. In this case, however, I don't think there is much risk: even the most unscrupulous person could hardly say that--that----"
"That we were becoming Herbert Courtland's champions, because we were in love with him?"
"Well, I don't know. Wasn't that what you meant to suggest people would say of a woman who became a man's champion?"
"Something in that way. How straightforwardly you speak out what's on your mind!"
"Oh, I'm a girl of to-day. I have got over all those absurd affectations of childishness which used to be thought feminine long ago. The gambols of the kitten were once thought the most attractive thing on earth, and they are very interesting: but for the full-grown cat to pretend that it is perfectly happy with a ball of worsted, when all the time it has its heart set on a real mouse, is nonsense."
"That is an allegory, a subtle parable, Phyllis. But I fancy I can interpret it. You are quite right. Men know that we, the full-grown cats, take no interest in the ravelings of wool as mediums of diversion--that we have our hearts set on mice. Oh, yes! it is much better to be straightforward in our speech--it is even sometimes better to be quite straight in our ways as well. It usually prevents misunderstanding. There is scarcely a subject that women may not talk about to men in the most direct way, nowadays. But about the question of championship----"
Here the door of the room was thrown open and Mr. Herbert Courtland was announced.
"I quite forgot to mention that Mr. Courtland was lunching with us to-day, Phyllis," said Ella, while shaking hands with her visitor.
"Now you will have a chance of getting the slave-dealer's account of the whole business. Are you a slave-dealer, Bertie? If so, why don't you wear the usual broad-leaved hat of your order?"
"It is I who am the enslaved one," said Mr. Courtland, laying his hand to the left of the buttons of his white waistcoat and bowing the bow of the early years of the century, with a glance at each lady.
"What a pretty reminiscence of the age of artificiality!" said Ella;
"and what an apt commentary upon the subject we were talking about, Phyllis! We were discussing the merits of directness in speech and straightness in every way. We were ridiculing the timid maid--all sandals and simper--of forty years ago. Why should men and women have ever taken the trouble to be affected? Let us go in to lunch and eat with the appetites of men and women of the nineties, not with the nibblings of society of the fifties. Come along, Phyllis. Mr. Courtland will tell us all about his dreadful goings on, his slave-dealings, his dynamitings. Have you seen that article in the--what's the name of the paper, Phyllis?"
"The /Spiritual Aneroid/," said Phyllis.
"I haven't been so fortunate," said he.
"Then we shall take the paper into the dining room with us, and place it before you. If you were guilty of the doings that the article details, you would do well to--to--well, to adopt the picturesque costume incidental to ruffianism--the linen jacket of the slave-trader, the mangy fur collar of the dynamity man of war. Have you ever trafficked in human beings, Mr. Courtland?"
"Well, yes," said he. "I have done a little in that way, I admit."
"And dynamite--have you ever massacred people with dynamite?" Ella continued.
"Well, when my dynamite exploded, the people who were in the immediate neighborhood were never just the same afterward," said he.
"Finally, did you allow yourself to be worshiped as God?" she asked.
"Yes, I got them to do that," he replied. "I have experienced all human sensations, including those of a god in working order."
"Then I hope you will make a good lunch. We begin with white-bait."
"I am quite satisfied to begin with white-bait," said he.
