"I'd like you to take that Hugo," he said. "I dare say it would interest you.... Remind you of old times."
"Oh no!"
"You can return it, when you like."
Her features became apologetic. She had too hastily assumed that he wished to force a gift on her.
"Please!" he ejaculated. No abuse this time of moral authority! But an appeal, boyish, wistful, supplicating. It was irresistible, completely irresistible. It gave her an extraordinary sense of personal power.
He wrapped up the book for her in a sheet of blue "draft" paper that noisily crackled. While he was doing so, a tiny part of her brain was, as it were, automatically exploring a box of old books in the attic at home and searching therein for a Gasc's French-English Dictionary which she had used at school and never thought of since.
"My compliments to your mother," he said at parting.
She gazed at him questioningly.
"Oh! I was forgetting," he corrected himself, with an avuncular, ironic smile. "You're not supposed to have seen me, are you?"
Then she was outside in the din; and from thrilling altitudes she had to bring her mind to marketing. She hid under apples the flat blue parcel in the basket.