“Well, own to my perspicacity when I tell you, then, that you were thinking about mademoiselle Alix. You were reassembling your arguments against the Russian ballet and reflecting that the best of them would be that it is idle to go to art for something we can find more perfectly displayed in nature.”
Giles stared at him. It was near enough to cause him to stare.
“Well?” smiled monsieur de Valenbois.
“How did you know I was thinking about Alix?” Giles demanded.
“How did I know?—Because I was!” laughed monsieur de Valenbois. “And the same thoughts.”
Madame Vervier was looking at them both, and again, Giles imagined, with her veiled vigilance. “The Russian ballet?” she questioned. “What has Alix to do with the Russian ballet?”
“Forgive my execrable taste, chère madame!” exclaimed monsieur de Valenbois, “in making mademoiselle Alix the subject of these divinations! But did you remark the way in which she bounded out of the house just now? It was a remarkable bound,” smiled monsieur de Valenbois. “It started the same strain of thought in me and in monsieur Giles, you see. We were discussing the Russian ballet last night.”
“But I wasn’t thinking about the Russian ballet,” Giles rather helplessly protested, and he felt madame Vervier not quite pleased. “That’s what I should have thought, no doubt, if it had come to my mind. But it didn’t.”
“Ah; but the essential you will not deny,” said monsieur de Valenbois, and Giles, feeling his blushes mount again, wondered just how far the essential had indeed been divined.
Alix was gazing first at him, then at monsieur de Valenbois and then at her mother; and her mother’s eyes, while they caressed and approved her silence, put her aside into the retirement suitable to a jeune fille.