“No.”
“That high yo’ng man!” she said, and laughed. “Oh, it is not nice for you to make fon of me. High.... Tall.... How shall one tell them apart?”
“Don’t try,” Kendall said. Then he laughed at his recollections of her blunders in a strange language. “At what hour do you lift up?” he mimicked her.
“I have study English since you have gone away. I know that now. It is not lift up; it is raise up. At what hour do you raise up in the morning. N’est-ce pas?”
“You have studied!” he exclaimed. “I’m proud of you. But you speak English better than I do now.”
“Better than you do French,” she said, with a little grimace.
“What have you been doing while I was away?” he asked, and asked because he was really curious. He wanted to know something about her life away from him, about her regular routine life. To him now she was a creature that appeared as out of a fog, to disappear again into a fog, untraceable, strange, mysterious. She must do something. She must have a family. She must live in a house and sleep in a bed and take her meals at a table. It must be that she had her friends and her little every-day affairs, different, perhaps, from the every-day affairs of the American girl, but nevertheless taking up the greater part of her life.... He wished he could have the history of one of her days from waking to sleeping, could be present to oversee one of her days.
“I have been lonely,” she said. So she always answered, and, it seemed to him, not from any conscious effort to hide her life from him, but rather because when she was with him it was her belief that nothing was of interest to them but each other. It was as if she wanted to shut all the rest of the world out, forget all the world and its business, and remember only themselves and their little moments of happiness together. No, it was not concealment, it was the exclusiveness of love. “I—many times—I thought you would not come.... And I was sad.” She pressed his arm gently.
They boarded the red car—first class—of the Metro, and it started its rather leisurely journey westward under the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Élysées. Kendall always insisted on riding first class on the subway, though Andree urged it was a scandalous waste of money. One could ride as comfortably second class, or, if the trip were very short, the saving by taking third class was worth one’s while. The car was crowded—women, a few old men in civilian clothes, poilus, officers (one with four medals on his breast), Belgians with little gold tassels dangling from the fronts of their caps, two English soldiers in an advanced state of intoxication who recognized Kendall as belonging to a kindred race and shouted joyously to him from afar.
“Hey, matey, does this ’ere car git us to the Gare St.-Nizaire?”