The Fighting Chance

"When?"

"After you leave here?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know where you are going?"

"I'm going to town."

"And then?"

"I don't know."

"Oh, but haven't you been asked somewhere? You have, of course."

"Yes, and I have declined."

"Matters of business," she inferred. "Too bad!"

"Oh, no."

"Then," she concluded, laughing, "you don't care to tell me where you are going."

"No," he said thoughtfully, "I don't care to tell you."

She laughed again carelessly, and, placing one hand on the tiled pavement, sprang lightly to her feet.

"A last plunge?" she asked, as he rose at her side.

"Yes, one last plunge together. Deep! Are you ready?"

She raised her white arms above her head, finger-tips joined, poised an instant on the brink, swaying forward; then, at his brief word, they flashed downward together, cutting the crystalline sea-water, shooting like great fish over the glass-tiled bed, shoulder to shoulder under the water; and opening their eyes, they turned toward one another with a swift outstretch of hands, an uncontrollable touch of lips, the very shadow of contact; then cleaving upward, rising to the surface to lie breathlessly floating, arms extended, and the sun filtering down through the ground-glass roof above.

"We are perfectly crazy," she breathed. "I'm quite mad; I see that. On land it's bad enough for us to misbehave; but submarine sentiment! We'll be growing scales and tails presently. … Did you ever hear of a Southern bird--a sort of hawk, I think--that almost never alights; that lives and eats and sleeps its whole life away on the wing? and even its courtship, and its honeymoon? Grace Ferrall pointed one out to me last winter, near Palm Beach--a slender bird, part black, part snowy white, with long, pointed, delicate wings like an enormous swallow; and all day, all night, it floats and soars and drifts in the upper air, never resting, never alighting except during its brief nesting season. … Think of the exquisite bliss of drifting one's life through in mid-air--to sleep, balanced on light wings, upborne by invisible currents flowing under the stars--to sail dreamily through the long sunshine, to float under the moon! … And at last, I suppose, when its time has come, down it whirls out of the sky, stone dead! … There is something thrilling in such a death--something magnificent. … And in the exquisitely spiritual honeymoon, vague as the shadow of a rainbow, is the very essence and aroma of that impalpable Paradise we women prophesy in dreams! … More sentiment! Heigho! My brother is the weeping crocodile, and the five winds are my wits. … Shall we dress? Even with a maid and the electric air-blast it will take time to dry my hair and dress it."