Then she yawned with deliberate cruelty.

"However," she concluded, "I shall call you Olaf, just the same."

"Er--h'm!" said the colonel.

* * * * *

And this stuttering boor (he reflected) was Colonel Rudolph Musgrave,
confessedly the social triumph of his generation! This imbecile, without
a syllable to say for himself, without a solitary adroit word within
tongue's reach, wherewith to annihilate the hussy, was a Musgrave of
Matocton!

* * * * *

And she did. To her he was "Olaf" from that day forth.

Rudolph Musgrave called her, "You." He was nettled, of course, by her
forwardness--"Olaf," indeed!--yet he found it, somehow, difficult to
bear this fact in mind continuously.

For while it is true our heroes and heroines in fiction no longer fall
in love at first sight, Nature, you must remember, is too busily
employed with other matters to have much time to profit by current
literature. Then, too, she is not especially anxious to be realistic.
She prefers to jog along in the old rut, contentedly turning out
chromolithographic sunrises such as they give away at the tea stores,
contentedly staging the most violent and improbable melodramas;