“Well!” she said.
“Well!” he replied.
She leant over and tapped him on the arm with her fan. “You hold a distinct initial advantage over me, you know, Mr. X. Anonymity is such a terribly strong position in which to entrench one’s self. To you I am Sheila Delaney—to me you are—an unknown quantity.”
He smiled appreciatively. “Yet one usually concludes by finding the value of X—shall we say.”
“If one is successful,” she replied, “you have to be successful, you know, to discover the true value.”
He smiled again.
“I think I am going to like you,” she went on very frankly and disarmingly, “there is something about you that attracts me—you have a—what shall I call it—a ‘je ne sais quoi’——”
He fingered her fan with a kind of mocking assurance playing round the line of his lips. She lifted her left hand as he did so. “Hark!” she exclaimed, “those violins—I love violins—they croon—don’t they? They’ve got something in their music that no other instrument has—‘silky susurrus of petticoats ravishing—violins crooning above—drowsy exotics their essences lavishing—whispers of Scandal and Love’—I’m afraid I’ve misquoted,” she continued breathlessly, “but a perfectly topping dance always makes me think of that.”
“You like dancing?” he asked simply.
“I adore it,” she answered just as simply—then relapsed into a contemplative silence. Suddenly she looked up at him with mischievous eyes. “Do you dance?” she inquired.