“I wish it were months later,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because then I could care for you, and see to it that you did not suffer from the chill.  I don’t know though, even with the admirable supervision I’d have over you then, whether you would take proper care of yourself, my Brownie.  What would you do?”

“I don’t know quite,” she answered.  “I think I should want to get pretty near the grate.  I’d pull one of the tiger-skins or bear-skins on the rug, very close to the fire, and I’d curl down on the fur and turn about a little, and get very warm.”

He assumed a lofty air, and announced that he was under the impression that, when chilled, she would do nothing of the sort!  He had his own ideas regarding the treatment of chills of small, brown women.  What would really occur, what the solid, tangible fact of the occasion would be, required no effort to describe.  He should merely draw a great easy-chair before the grate.  Then some one would be picked up and turned about before the fire until thoroughly warmed and with full circulation of the blood again.  She should be simply, but scientifically, toasted: 

  “I’d hold you thus before the brand,
  To catch caloric blisses,
  And you should be my muffin and
  I’d butter you with kisses.”

She responded that the gift of doggerel was not one to be desired, and, furthermore, that she was not a muffin, nor anything in the culinary way.

All of which, of course, served but as provocation to further flippancy, and, for days later, the lady was referred to as his own sweetest soda biscuit, his bun, his precious fruit-cake, and so on, until a bakery’s terms were so exhausted.  All this was, no doubt, silliness.

The woman, in her way, was not less inexcusable than the man.  She was as much in love as he, and the strictly personal equation was as strong within her.  She would watch him when they were at lunch together, and if her gaze was not so bold and feeding as was his, it was at heart as earnest.

She wanted to do something, because of the passionately loving mood within her.  She wanted to “hurt” him just a little, and one day occurred an odd thing.

They were chatting across a little table in a restaurant almost vacant save for them, and he had made some grotesque sweetheart comment which had pleased her fancy, lovingly alert, and she suddenly straightened in her seat and looked at him with eyes which were becoming dewy, but said never a word.

She looked all about the room in one swift, comprehensive glance, and then, leaning over, with her small right hand she smote him hardly upon the cheek.  There was no occasion for such demonstration.  It was but the outpouring, the sweet, barbaric fancy of the woman, in line with the man’s grotesquerie, and not one whit less affectionate.  And he, thus smitten, made no remonstrance nor defense, further than to refer incidentally to his slender sweet assailant as “a burly ruffian.”