"Well, I should think you must, if that's the way you go to work!" said Cicely, with eyes brimful of merriment and mischief--"Why you are worse than the artists of the Quartier Latin! If you must needs 'experience' your models, I wonder that Susan, Sarah and Jane of the bar and tap-room are good enough for you!"
"Any human female suffices,"--murmured Julian, drowsily, "Provided she is amenable,--and is not the mother of a large family. At the spectacle of many olive branches, the Muse shrieks a wild farewell!" Cicely broke into a peal of laughter.
"You absurd creature!" she said--"You don't mean half the nonsense you talk--you know you don't!"
"Do I not? But then, what do I mean? Am I justified in assuming that I mean anything?" And he again ran his fingers through his ruddy locks abstractedly. "No,--I think not! Therefore, if I now make a suggestion, pray absolve me from any serious intentions underlying it--and yet---"
"'And yet'--what?" queried Cicely, looking at him with some curiosity.
"Ah! 'And yet'! Such little words, 'and yet'!" he murmured--"They are like the stepping-stones across a brook which divides one sweet woodland dell from another! 'And yet'!" He sighed profoundly, and plucking a daisy from the turf, gazed into its golden heart meditatively. "What I would say, gentle Goblin, is this,--you call me Moon-calf, therefore there can be no objection to my calling you Goblin, I think?"
"Not the least in the world!" declared Cicely--"I rather like it!"
"So good of you!--so dear!" he said, softly--"Well!--'and yet'--as I have observed, the Muse may, like the Delphic oracle, utter words without apparent signification, which only the skilled proficient at her altar may be able to unravel. Therefore,--in this precise manner, my suggestion may be wholly without point,--or it may not."
"Please get on with it, whatever it is,"--urged Cicely, impatiently- -"You're not going to propose to me, are you? Because, if so, it's no use. I'm too young, and I only met you this morning!"
He threw the daisy he had just plucked at her laughing face.
"Goblin, you are delicious!" he averred--"But the ghastly spectre of matrimony does not at present stand in my path, luring me to the frightful chasms of domesticity, oblivion and despair. What was it the charming Russian girl Bashkirtseff wrote on this very subject? 'Me marier et'---?"