“Now, do I get forgiven?” he begged. “It’s vile stuff. An’ I drank every drop, Dey. Please be friends again. Aw, please do!”
“You big overgrown baby!” she said looking laughingly down into his red, remorseful face. “You talk very, very loudly about being a ‘grown man’, and a financier. And some of the papers call you ‘Brute’ Conover—the wretched sheets! But you’re only about ten years old. No one knows you except me. To the others you may be able to talk as if you were grown up, but it never imposes on me for a minute.”
“That’s right,” he assented wonderingly. “I never thought of it that way before. I don’t know why it is except maybe because I never had any boyhood or had a chance to be young. I seem to have been born grown up an’ on the lookout to get the best of the next feller. Then, when I get with you, I lose about twenty years and feel like a kid. It’s great to be that way. Nobody else ever makes me feel so.”
“I suppose not,” mocked the girl. “Your other friends are fossly people all about a million years old. And you look on me as a child and try to talk and act down to my level. It is very humiliating. I’m nearly twenty and quite grown up and—”
“Your eyes are, anyhow,” commented Caleb. “They’re two sizes too large for your face.”
“Is that a compliment? If it is—”
“I don’t know,” pursued Conover. “I never noticed how big they was till one day when you were drinkin’ ice-tea. Then, all of a sudden, it struck me that if your eyes wasn’t so big you’d be li’ble to tumble into your glass. Now you’re mad again!” he sighed. “But it’s true. You’re awful little. You don’t much more’n come up to my elbow.”
“When you’re quite through saying woozzey things about my size and my eyes,” said Desirée, coldly, “perhaps you won’t mind talking of something sensible?”
“If you’d just as leave,” hesitated Caleb, “I’d like to talk a little ’bout what you said a few minutes ago. About my bein’ young. You don’t get it quite right. I’m not young an’ I never was or will be,—except with you. When you an’ me are together, some part of me that I don’t gener’lly know is there, seems to take charge. Maybe I don’t explain it very clear. I don’t seem quite to understand it myself. Here’s the idee: D’you remember that measly little green-covered French book I found you cryin’ over, once? The ‘Vee’ of something.”
“You mean Barriere’s ‘Vie de Bohéme?’”