He said lamely: "I'm sorry — that was a lot of years ago, and I was crashing all over town and seeing so many people, and I can't have been noticing much."
"Oh, well," she said, with a stage sigh. "Dexter the Forgotten Girl. What a life!... And I thought you came to my rescue tonight because you remembered. But all the time you were taken up with so many people that you never even saw me."
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I must have been taken up with too many people. And I'll never forgive any of them."
She looked at him, and her smile was teasing and gay, and her eyes were straight and friendly with it, so that it was all only chatter and she was not even trying to sell him anything; and he could only smile back and think how much better it could have been if he remembered.
"Maybe you don't know how lucky you were," she said.
"Maybe I don't," he said.
And it was a curious thing that he only half understood what he was saying, or only half meant what he said; it was only a throwaway line until after it was spoken, and then it was something that could never be thrown away.
This was something that had never been in his mind at all when he abandoned himself to the simple enjoyment of smacking Dr. Ernst Zellermann in the smooch.
He lighted another cigarette with no less care than he had devoted to the other operation, and said nothing more until the taxi drew up outside a black and white painted brick building on the river side of Sutton Place South. He got out and helped her out, and she said: "Come in for a minute and let me fix you a real drink."
"That's just what I needed," he said, and paid off the taxi, and strolled up beside her as casually as if they had known, each other for a hundred years, and it was just like that, and that was how it was.