s a prophecy!--I formally invite you to take
a trip with me in my motor-boat. It may cost us half, if not more, of
your part of the legacy; but I will merely borrow from you the
wherewithal to pay our expenses. Somehow--afterwards--I'll pay it back,
even if I have to reestablish communication with heavenly shop-girls and
villainous duchesses. Oh, Phil, we'll get some fun out of this, after
all. Anyhow, we shall go on _living_--for a few weeks. What matter if,
after that, the deluge?"

"You speak exactly as if you were planning to be an _adventuress_," said
Phyllis, coldly.

"I should love to be one," said I. "I've always thought it must be more
fun than anything--till the last chapter. We'll both embark--in the
motor-boat--on a brief but bright career as adventuresses."

With that, before she could give me an answer, I opened the door and
walked out in my dressing-gown, so suddenly that she almost pitched
forward into the bath. Phyllis, heard from behind a cold, unsympathetic
door, and Phyllis seen in all her virginal Burne-Jones attractiveness,
might as well be two different girls. If you carried on a conversation
with Miss Rivers on ethics and conventionalities and curates, and things
of that kind from behind a door, without having first peeped round to
see what she was like, you would do the real Phil an injustice.

There is nothing pink and soft and dimpled about Phyllis's views of life
(or, at least, what she supposes her views to be); but about Phyllis in
flesh and blood there is more of that than anything else; which is one
reason why she has been a constant fountain of joy to my heart as well
as my sense of humor, ever since her clever Herefordshire father married
my pretty Kentucky mother.

Phil would like, if published, to be a Sunday-school book, and a volume
of "Good Form for High Society" rolled into one; but she is really more
like a treatise on flower-gardens, and a recipe for making Devonshire
junket with clotted cream.

Not that she's a regular beauty, or that she goes in for any speciality
by way of features or eyelashes, or hair, or a figure, or anything
really sensational of that sort, as I do in one or two directions. But
there's a rose and pearl and gold-brown adorableness about her; you like
her all the better for some little puritanical quaintnesses; and if you
are an Englishman or an American girl, you long to bully her.

She is taller than I am (as she ought to be, with Burne-Jones nose