"Why not?"
She seated herself on the sofa and cast a veiled glance at him, enchantingly malicious.
"Do you think you know me well enough to adore me?" she inquired with misleading gravity.
"Indeed I do----"
"Am I as easy to know as that? Jim, you humiliate me."
"I didn"t say that you are easy to know----"
"You meant it!" she insisted reproachfully. "You think so, too--just because I let myself be picked up--by a perfectly strange man----"
"Good heavens, Palla--" he began nervously; but caught the glimmer in her lowered eyes--saw her child"s mouth tremulous with mirth controlled.
"Oh, Jim!" she said, still laughing, "do you think I care how we met?
How absurd of you to let me torment you. You"re altogether too boyish, too self-conscious. You"re loaded down with all the silly traditions which I"ve thrown away. I don"t care how we met. I"m glad we know each other."
She opened a silver box on a little table at her elbow, chose a cigarette, lighted it, and offered it to him.
"I rather like the taste of them now," she remarked, making room for him on the sofa beside her.
When he was seated, she reached up to a jar of flowers on the piano, selected a white carnation, broke it short, and then drew the stem through his lapel, patting the blossom daintily into a pom-pon.
"Now," she said gaily, "if you"ll let me, I"ll straighten your tie.
Shall I?"
He turned toward her; she accomplished that deftly, then glanced across at the clock.
"We"ve only half an hour longer to ourselves," she exclaimed, with that unconscious candour which always thrilled him. Then, turning to him, she said laughingly: "Does it really matter how two people meet when time races with us like that?"
"And do you realise," he said in a low, tense voice, "that since I met you every racing minute has been sweeping me headlong toward you?"
She was so totally unprepared for the deeper emotion in his voice and bearing--so utterly surprised--that she merely gazed at him.
"Haven"t you been aware of it, Palla?" he said, looking her in the eyes.
"Jim!" she protested, "you are disconcerting! You never before have taken such a tone toward me."
She rose, walked over to the clock, examined it minutely for a few moments. Then she turned, cast a swift, perplexed glance at him, and came slowly back to resume her place on the sofa.
"Men should be very, very careful what they say to me." As she lifted her eyes he saw them beginning to glimmer again with that irresponsible humour he knew so well.
"Be careful," she said, her brown gaze gay with warning; "--I"m G.o.dless and quite lawless, and I"m a very dangerous companion for any well-behaved and orthodox young man who ventures to tell me that I"m adorable. Why, you might as safely venture to adore Diana of the Ephesians! And you know what she did to her admirers."
"She was really Aphrodite, wasn"t she?" he said, laughing.
"Aphrodite, Venus, Isis, Lada--and the Ephesian Diana--I"m afraid they all were hussies. But I"m a hussy, too, Jim! If you doubt it, ask any well brought up girl you know and tell her how we met and how we"ve behaved ever since, and what obnoxious ideas I entertain toward all things conventional and orthodox!"
"Palla, are you really serious?--I"m never entirely sure what is under your badinage."
"Why, of course I am serious. I don"t believe in any of the things that you believe in. I"ve often told you so, though you don"t believe me----"
"Nonsense!"
"I don"t, I tell you. I did once. But I"m awake. No "threats of h.e.l.l or hopes of any sugary paradise" influence me. Nor does custom and convention. Nor do the laws and teachings of our present civilisation matter one straw to me. I"d break every law if it suited me."
He laughed and lifted her hand from her lap: "You funny child," he said, "you wouldn"t steal, for example--would you?"
"I don"t desire to."
"Would you commit perjury?"
"No!"
"Murder?"
"I have a law of my own, kind sir. It doesn"t happen to permit murder, arson, forgery, piracy, smuggling----"
Their irresponsible laughter interrupted her.
"What else wouldn"t you do?" he managed to ask.
"I wouldn"t do anything mean, deceitful, dishonest, cruel. But it"s not your antiquated laws--it"s my own and original law that governs my conduct."
"You always conform to it?"
"I do. But you don"t conform to yours. So I"ll try to help you remember the petty but always sacred conventions of our own accepted code----"
And, with unfeigned malice, she began to disengage her hand from his--loosened the slim fingers one by one, all the while watching him sideways with prim lips pursed and lifted eyebrows.
"Try always to remember," she said, "that, according to your code, any demonstration of affection toward a comparative stranger is exceedingly bad form."
However, he picked up her hand again, which she had carelessly left lying on the sofa near his, and again she freed it, leisurely.
They conversed animatedly, as always, discussing matters of common interest, yet faintly in her ears sounded the unfamiliar echo of pa.s.sion.
It haunted her mind, too--an indefinable undertone delicately persistent--until at last she sat mute, absent-minded, while he continued speaking.
Her stillness--her remote gaze, perhaps--presently silenced him. And after a little while she turned her charming head and looked at him with that unintentional provocation born of virginal curiosity.
What had moved him so unexpectedly to deeper emotion? Had she? Had she, then, that power? And without effort?--For she had been conscious of none.... But--if she tried.... Had she the power to move him again?
Nave instinct--the emotionless curiosity of total inexperience--everything embryonic and innocently ruthless in her was now in the ascendant.
She lifted her eyes and considered him with the speculative candour of a child. She wished to hear once more that unfamiliar _something_ in his voice--see it in his features----
And she did not know how to evoke it.