"When?"
"When the sunshine is turned off and the snow comes."
"I don't know, Mr. Drene." She broke her chocolate cake into halves
and laid one on his knee.
"Thanks for further temptation," he said grimly.
"You are welcome. It's good, isn't it?"
"Excellent. Adam liked the apple, too. But it raised hell with
him."
She laughed, shot a direct glance at him, and began to nibble her
cake, with her eyes still fixed on him.
Once or twice he encountered her gaze but his own always wandered
absently elsewhere.
"You think a great deal, don't you?" she remarked.
"Don't you?"
"I try not to--too much."
"What?" he asked, swallowing the last morsel of cake.
She shrugged her shoulders: "What's the advantage of thinking?"
He considered her reply for a moment, her blue and rather childish
eyes, and the very pure oval of her face. Then his attention flagged
as usual--was wandering--when she sighed, very lightly, so that he
scarcely heard it--merely noticed it sufficiently to conclude that,
as usual, there was the inevitable hard luck story afloat in her
vicinity, and that he lacked the interest to listen to it.
"Thinking," she said, "is a luxury to a tranquil mind and a
punishment to a troubled one. So I try not to."
It was a moment or two before it occurred to him that the girl had
uttered an unconscious epigram.
"It sounded like somebody--probably Montaigne. Was it?" he inquired.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Oh. Then it wasn't. You're a funny little girl, aren't you?"
"Yes, rather."
"On purpose?"
"Yes, sometimes."
He looked into her very clear eyes, now brightly blue with
intelligent perception of his not too civil badinage.
"And sometimes," he went on, "you're funny when you don't intend to
be."
"You are, too, Mr. Drene."
"What?"
"Didn't you know it?"
A dull color tinted his cheek bones.
"No," he said, "I didn't know it."
"But you are. For instance, you don't walk; you stalk. You do what
novelists make their gloomy heroes do--you stride. It's rather
funny."
"Really. And do you find my movements comic?"
She was a trifle scared, now, but she laughed her breathless,
youthful laugh: "You are really very dramatic--a perfect story-book man. But, you
know, sometimes they are funny when the author doesn't intend them
to be. . . . Please don't be angry."