"Now you must go home," he said.
"Yes," said Nancy, "now I must go home." And she wondered vaguely whether home was the boarding-house in Lexington Avenue or Mrs. Johnstone's flat in 82nd Street. She decided that it was the flat, where the bunch of orchids and maidenhair had come and lived almost a week. Peggy and George would be her friends again, and the dead Mr. Johnstone, and the naked baby, and the chinless young man would be with her in the evenings. And Anne-Marie must leave Fräulein Müller's Gartenhaus, and go back to school on Sixth Avenue.
"What are your thoughts," said the Ogre.
"...I was wondering what made you send that messenger-boy with the flowers and the letter—the letter to the girl in blue.... It was not a bit like you," she said. And, looking into the hard face, she added: "You are not at all like that."
"I know I'm not," he said. Then he added, with a laugh, "Thank God! But we all do things that are not like ourselves now and then. Don't we?" She did not answer. "Don't you?" he insisted.
Nancy sighed and wondered. "I don't know. What is like me, and what is not like me? I do not know at all. I do not know myself."
"I do," said the Ogre. And there was another long silence. He had the aggravating habit of stopping short after a sentence that one would like to hear continued.
"Speak," said Nancy. "Say more."
"It was not like me to send those useless and expensive flowers out into the world to nobody, and to write a crazy letter in's Blaue hinein—into space. But we all have mad moments in our lives when we do things that are quite unlike us." A pause again. "It was not like you to write me those letters describing your old-rose curtains—afterwards they were blue velvet—and your scented cigarettes, and your jewels, and your lovers. And it was not like you to cross the Atlantic and come to Paris and to supper with a man you had never met, in order to see whether you could get money out of him."