“What?”
She repeated it: “I haven’t thanked you for saving my life.”
“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t do anything of the kind.”
“You did, Mr. Bromley.”
“I certainly did not,” he said, astonished that she seemed genuinely to believe such a thing. “The taxicab was banging around all over the sidewalk by the time I reached you.”
“No,” she insisted. “I heard you call my name, and then you took hold of me. If you hadn’t, I’d have gone straight on.”
“Well, you’d have been all right to go straight on, because by that time the taxicab was twenty or thirty feet away.”
“No, I’d have been killed,” she said. “If you hadn’t caught me, I’d have been killed absolutely.”
He stared at her, perplexed, though he knew that people often retain but a confused recollection of exciting moments, even immediately after those moments have passed. Then, with this thought in his mind, he was a little surprised to find that she simultaneously had it in her mind, too.
“Maybe you were a little excited to see a person in danger,” she said. “It might have got you mixed up or something. When things happen so quickly, it’s hard to remember exactly what did happen. You may not know it, but you saved my life, Mr. Bromley.”