"Your unseemly levity, Margaret, makes it necessary for me to defer my remarks on natural phenomena until some more fitting occasion."
"Oh, Richard, don't let an atmospherical change come over _you!"_
"When you knocked at my door, months ago," said Richard, "I didn't dream you were such a satirical little piece, or may be you wouldn't have got in. You stood there as meek as Moses, with your frock reaching only to the tops of your boots. You were a deception, Margaret."
"I was dreadfully afraid of you, Richard."
"You are showing your true colors. That long dress, too! I believe the train has turned your head."
"So I did, and do. It makes you look quite like a woman, though."
"I want to be a woman. I would like to be as old--as old as Mrs. Methuselah. Was there a Mrs. Methuselah?"
"I really forget," replied Richard, considering. "But there must have been. The old gentleman had time enough to have several. I believe, however, that history is rather silent about his domestic affairs."
"Well, then," said Margaret, after thinking it over, "I would like to be as old as the youngest Mrs. Methuselah."
"That was probably the last one," remarked Richard, with great profundity. "She was probably some giddy young thing of seventy or eighty. Those old widowers never take a wife of their own age. I shouldn't want you to be seventy, Margaret,--or even eighty."
"On the whole, perhaps, I shouldn't fancy it myself. Do you approve of persons marrying twice?"
"Of course I didn't mean that," said Margaret, with asperity. "How provoking you can be!"
"But they used to,--in the olden time, don't you know?"
Richard burst out laughing. "Imagine him," he cried,--"imagine Methuselah in his eight or nine hundredth year, dressed in his customary bridal suit, with a sprig of century-plant stuck in his button-hole!"
"Richard," said Margaret solemnly, "you shouldn't speak jestingly of a scriptural character."
At this Richard broke out again. "But gracious me!" he exclaimed, suddenly checking himself. "I am forgetting you all this while!"
Richard hurriedly reversed the mass of plaster on the table, and released Margaret's half-petrified fingers. They were shriveled and colorless with the cold.
"There isn't any feeling in it whatever," said Margaret, holding up her hand helplessly, like a wounded wing.