And then, to break the spell, he asked
her why she had laughed a little while back, over something she had said
about Robert W. Chambers' novels.
"I was thinking," she said, "of the awful disgrace I got into yesterday,
with somebody--well, with Bertram Willis, by saying something like that.
I'll have to tell you about it."
Bertram Willis, it should be said, was the young architect with the
upturned mustaches and the soft Byronic collars, who had done the house
for the McCreas. And I must warn you to take the adjective young, with a
grain of salt. Youth was no mere accident with him. He made an art of
it, just as he did of eating and drinking and love-making and,
incidentally, architecture. He was enormously in demand, chiefly
perhaps, among young married women whose respectability and social
position were alike beyond cavil. He never carried anything too far, you
see. He was no pirate--a sort, rather, of licensed privateer. And what
made him so invincibly attractive--after you had granted his other
qualities, that is--was that he professed himself, among women,
exceedingly difficult to please, so that attentions from him, even of a
casual sort, became _ex hypothesi_ compliments of the first order.
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