“D’you like my name for you, Meester Deek?”
She sat bending forward, her face illumined by the racing street-lights and her body in darkness. He was tempted to trespass—tempted to reach out for her hand and, if she allowed that, to take her in his arms. She looked very sweet and unresisting, with her cloak falling back from her white shoulders and her head drooping. But instinct warned him: she beckoned attack only to repell it. He remembered what she had told him about the women who said “No,” the women who eked out their affection.
“D’you like my name for you, Meester Deek?” There was all the passion of the south in the way she asked it.
“I like it. But why don’t you call me by my own name? You speak of Horace and Tom.”
“Ah, that’s different.”
“How?”
She shrugged her shoulders and threw back her cloak. The fragrance of her stole out towards him.
“They’ll be always just Horace and Tom to me, while you—perhaps. I can’t explain, Meester Deek, if you don’t understand.”
In her own peculiar way, half shy, half bold, she had told him that, just as he held her separate from all women, so she held him separate.
“I’d rather have you call me Meester Deek than—than anything in the whole world, now that I know.”