Out of the corner of his eye he watched her eat. She was very dainty about it, but also very interested. Indeed, she ate in a thoroughly business-like manner, giving her attention fully to her plate. He thought of a bird. Indeed, there was something birdlike about her, but what bird she resembled Kendall could not determine. Possibly it was a composite resemblance.... He liked her very much, but was puzzled by her. She was something quite outside his experience. Her manner puzzled him. She was not what he would have called “offish.” She did not seem wholly at her ease, yet she was much more so than he. She was gravely expectant; concealing herself, perhaps, while she waited for self-disclosure on the part of Kendall.
She would drink but a fraction of a glass of wine and declined a cigarette at the end of the meal.... Then he called for the check and discovered that the rather light repast was to cost him seventy francs. He wondered if Andree were accustomed to eating seventy-franc meals, not knowing that this was the first experience of the kind she had ever had. Seventy francs would have sufficed nearly for her food for a month.... On the whole, she was a mystery to him, and as long as he knew her she continued to remain something of a mystery. He was incapable of solving her.
“Now what shall we do?” he asked.
“We shall walk,” she replied, in quaintly stilted and accented English. The effect was charming.
“Eh?” said Kendall. “You—why, you said you didn’t speak English!”
“Yes,” she said, and smiled, but offered no explanation. But the explanation was clear, even to Kendall. It was because she was making no admission whatever about herself in those first few minutes. It was because she was on the brink of a new experience, was meeting her first American, and because she wanted to find out as much as she could about him without permitting him to learn anything whatever of her—until she was ready to permit it.... He was pleased. Evidently her judgment was favoring him.
“That’s fine,” he said. “Now you can teach me French and I can teach you English.”
“Maybe,” she said, with her reserved smile. “We shall see.”
“Let’s take a taxi out to the Bois de Boulogne,” he suggested.
“It is very expensive.... It is not nécessaire. No, we shall walk.”