She threw back her head to fling him up a smile that struck him as adorably straightforward. "I like to hear one brother speak of another like that. You don't often."
"Oh, well, every brother couldn't, you know."
They had circled and reversed more than once before she sighed: "I wish I had a brother—or a sister. It's an awful bore being the only one."
"Better to be the only one than one of too many."
More minutes had gone by in the suave swinging of their steps to Offenbach's somnolent measures when she asked, abruptly, "Do you skate?"
"Sometimes. Do you?"
"I go to the Coliseum."
Claude's next question slipped out with the daring simplicity he knew how to employ. "Do you go on particular days?"
"I generally go on Tuesdays." If she was moved by an afterthought it was without flurry or apparent sense of having committed an indiscretion. "Not every Tuesday," she said, quietly, and dropped the subject there.
When, a few minutes later, she was resting on a rug thrown down on the steps, with Claude posed gracefully by her side, Archie Masterman found the opportunity to stroll near enough to his wife to say in an undertone, "Do you see Claude?"