When she turned to him, he was surprised to see that she looked astonishingly happy, almost as if she had been struggling with joy, instead of pain.
"This chair," she said, sinking into it, "makes me feel at home."
Naturally he could not understand.
"Because," she explained, "I once thought I was going to live in it. It has been reupholstered, but I should know it if I met in anywhere in the world!"
"How very odd!" exclaimed Eugene, staring.
"I settled here in pioneer days," she went on, tapping the arms lightly with her finger-tips. "It was the last dance I went to in Canaan."
"I fear the town was very provincial at that time," he returned, having completely forgotten the occasion she mentioned, therefore wishing to shift the subject. "I fear you may still find it so. There is not much here that one is in sympathy with, intellectually—few people really of the world."
"Few people, I suppose you mean," she said, softly, with a look that went deep enough into his eyes, "few people who really understand one?"
Eugene had seated himself on the sill of an open window close by. "There has been," he answered, with the ghost of a sigh, "no one."
She turned her head slightly away from him, apparently occupied with a loose thread in her sleeve. There were no loose threads; it was an old habit of hers which she retained. "I suppose," she murmured, in a voice as low as his had been, "that a man of your sort might find Canaan rather lonely and sad."