'Oh! That was all?'
'Goodness, no! You automatically became a protégé of mine when I picked you up last night. Isn't that a horrid expression?—but frightfully fashionable these unmoral days.'
'You must excuse me,' he said slowly, 'but I was foolish enough to think you came here because—well, because you wanted to.'
'So I did. An air-raid casualty is ever so much more romantic than a wounded soldier. If he lives through it, he always proposes the very next day either to the nurse or to the ambulance-driver, whereas a Tommy, after his third wound, becomes so blasé.'
'You shouldn't torture me,' he said, wincing noticeably under the incision of her words.
Just for a fleeting instant her eyes were softened with a tender look of self-reproach. His heart warmed at the sight, but before he could convince himself that it was not a creation of his own fancy, it had passed, and once more she was holding him at bay with her impersonal abruptness.
'Will you tell me about yourself?' he urged. 'Please.'
'What do you want to know?'
'Everything—everything!' he blurted out, impetuously leaning forward. 'My heavens! Don't you know how I've longed and waited for this moment ever since that night at your flat? I want to hear all about you—what you've done, where you've been, and—and in what mysterious way you've changed.'
'Have I changed?'