The Equinox (Volume I, Number VIII)

PROFESSOR ZIRCON assured him that it really wasn’t decent. “We won’t go to the Club, dear man. We'lljust drop in at the Escoffier for tea" The Professor grunted an assent; but he was more than half pleased. He wondered what his fairy looked like in her butterfly wings. The lounge of the Escoffier was full of people; but right across the room Professor Zircon could see Muriel with cornflowers in her yellow-ashen hair and her simple muslin dress. But she wore the diamonds he had given her, a string of starlight at her neck. How well he remembered that evening! He had taken her into the laboratory and heated up some sugar with sulphuric acid, loving her amazement as it swelled and blackened. “That is carbon now,” he had said, “ if we could only crystallize it, what splendid diamonds we could have ! But we can’t—not to any effect. Diamonds are always found in a kind of blue mud—I suppose there can’t be any here?" leading her to a box full of modelling clay which he used in some of his experiments. And he made her dive and dirty her dear little fingers ever so, before she ran against the necklace. And when they retrieved it quite, and washed it, and he put it round her neck for her very own ! She played in her demure, modest way; not very good, but pleasing enough to people who only wanted an excuse for not having to think sufficiently to talk while they \volfed foie gm: and watercress, muffins and éclairs, cheesecakes and hot buttered toast And she seemed to care as little for them as they for her. The Professor and the Colonel had risen to go.