“Would you be willing to meet her in New York or Cleveland or Chicago?”
She wrinkled her brows. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
“Here she would be just one of the sights of France—an experience. Well, I’m not going to have her on exhibition, like Notre Dame.”
“It isn’t that. It isn’t curiosity.... Really, I don’t know just what it is, but I want to be acquainted with her. I think it is so I can find out if it is really true that she—that she can live as she does and still be—nice.”
“I tell you she is nice.”
“But you are in love with her? Aren’t you in love with her? Somehow that makes a difference. It would seem sordid and inexcusable if you weren’t.”
“I am very fond of her.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes,” he said, desperately.
She was just picking up her fork. At his words it dropped and her lips compressed, but he did not notice. Perhaps he would have attached no significance to these signals if he had noticed, because he was fully occupied in thinking about himself. He had never taken time to consider Maude Knox’s possible feelings toward himself, although he had more than once tried in an inconclusive way to assay his own sentiments toward Maude. Not that he was exceptionally selfish or self-centered. He was only at that stage in his relations with Maude when he was trying to make out what those relations might develop into. Until a young man is fairly sure he wants a young woman very much he does not start to worry about whether she will want him.