self go--" she was blushing now, and old
Koschinsky nearly dropped a bird-cage in his astonishment.
"Yetta, Yetta!" Arthur insisted, "wind-bag, you call your comrade? Were
you not, just for a few minutes, in the same category? Again she was
silent.
"I feel now," he ejaculated, as he came very close to her, "that we must
get outside of these verbal entanglements. I want you to become my
wife." His heart sank as he thought of his mother's impassive, high-bred
air--with such a figure for a Fifth Avenue bride! The girl looked into
his weak blue eyes with their area of saucer-like whiteness. She shook
her stubborn head.
"I shall never marry. I do not believe in such an institution. It
degrades women, makes tyrants of men. No, Arthur--I am fond of you,
perhaps--" she paused,--"so fond that I might enter into any relation
but marriage,--that never!"
"And I tell you, Yetta, anarchy or no anarchy, I could never respect the
woman if she were not mine legally. In America we do these things
differently--" he was not allowed to finish.
She glared at him, then she strode to the shop door and opened it.
"Farewell to you, Mr. Arthur Schopenhauer Wyartz, amateur anarchist.
Better go back to your mother and sisters! _Mein Gott_, Schopenhauer,
too!" He put his Alpine hat on his bewildered head and without a word
went out. She did not look after him, but walked over to the old
bird-fancier and sat on his leather-topped stool. Presently she rested
her elbows on her knees and propped her chin with her gloveless hands.
Her eyes were red. Koschinsky peeped at her and shook his head.
"Yetta--you know what I think!--Yetta, the boy was right! You shouldn't
have asked him for the Star-Spangled Banner! The Marseillaise would have
been better."
"I don't care," she viciously retorted.
"I know, I know. But a nice boy--_so_ well fixed."
"I don't care," she insisted. "I'm married to the revolution."
"Yah, yah! the revolution, Yetta--" he pushed his lean, brown forefinger
into the cage of an enraged canary--"the revolution! Yes, Yetta
Silverman, the revolution!" She sighed.
XIV
HALL OF THE MISSING FOOTSTEPS
So I saw in my dream that the man began to run.
--_Pilgrim's Progress_.
I
As the first-class carriage rolled languidly out of Balak's only railway
station on a sultry February evening, Pobloff, the composer, was not
sorry.
"I wish it were Persia instead of Ramboul," he reflected. Luga, his
wif
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