once
missed an appointment with Perry; never once touched any thing to eat
or drink that she could offer him, if Perry had forbidden it. No other
human pursuit is so hostile to the influence of the sex as the pursuit
of athletic sports. No men are so entirely beyond the reach of women as
the men whose lives are passed in the cultivation of their own physical
strength. Geoffrey resisted Mrs. Glenarm without the slightest effort.
He casually extorted her admiration, and undesignedly forced her
respect. She clung to him, as a hero; she recoiled from him, as a brute;
she struggled with him, submitted to him, despised him, adored him, in a
breath. And the clew to it all, confused and contradictory as it seemed,
lay in one simple fact--Mrs. Glenarm had found her master.

"Take me to the lake, Geoffrey!" she said, with a little pleading
pressure of the blush-colored hand.

Geoffrey looked at his watch. "Perry expects me in twenty minutes," he
said.

"Perry again!"

"Yes."

Mrs. Glenarm raised her fan, in a sudden outburst of fury, and broke it
with one smart blow on Geoffrey's face.

"There!" she cried, with a stamp of her foot. "My poor fan broken! You
monster, all through you!"

Geoffrey coolly took the broken fan and put it in his pocket. "I'll
write to London," he said, "and get you another. Come along! Kiss, and
make it up."

He looked over each shoulder, to make sure that they were alone then
lifted her off the ground (she was no light weight), held her up in the
air like a baby, and gave her a rough loud-sounding kiss on each
cheek. "With kind compliments from yours truly!" he said--and burst out
laughing, and put her down again.

"How dare you do that?" cried Mrs. Glenarm. "I shall claim Mrs.
Delamayn's protection if I am to be insulted in this way! I will never
forgive you, Sir!" As she said those indignant words she shot a look at
him which flatly contradicted them. The next moment she was leaning on
his arm, and was looking at him wonderingly, for the thousandth time, as
an entire novelty in her experience of male human kind. "How rough
you are, Geoffrey!" she said, softly. He smiled in recognition of that
artless homage to the manly virtue of his character. She saw the smile,
and instantly made another effort to dispute the hateful supremacy of
Perry. "Put him off!" whispered the daughter of Eve, determined to lure
Adam into taking a bite of the apple. "Come, Geoffrey, dear, never mind
Perry, this once