“I have been—what do you say?—ennuyée?”
“Bored.”
“Yes, yes, bored.... Have you thought of me?”
He had intended to be most circumspect, to make no repetitions of his half-joking declaration of their last meeting, but with her delightful presence beside him, with that half-veiled, appealing glance from her darkly shadowed eyes, good resolutions were forgotten.
“I’ve thought of nothing else,” he said, and was near to the truth.
“But no”—she shook her head childishly—“you have not thought of me at all. It is not possible.”
“I thought of you when I got up, I thought of you all the morning, I thought of you at noon and all the afternoon—and I am thinking of you now.”
She laughed quietly. The drollery of his protestation pleased her and made her gay. Thereafter it became a formula, a sort of ritual. She would ask him if he had thought of her, and he would recite, “When I got up, all the morning, at noon, all the afternoon,” and always she would laugh as if it were very new and very funny and very delightful.
“Where do we go?” she said, as he took his place by her side.
“To dine with Arlette.”