He had paused in buttering a bit of roll. Anyone coming up just then would have thought he was looking at her, awaiting an answer to an inquiry after salt or something like that. She said: "Because I do not love you."
He waved his knife in airy dismissal. "A trifle! And so easily overcome."
"Because I cannot love you, my dear." She looked at him affectionately.
He balanced the bit of bread before his lips. "Not that brotherly look, please," said he. "It—it hurts!" He put the bread in his mouth.
She leaned forward and laid her hand on his. "We are too much alike. You are too subtle, too nervous, too appreciative, too changeable. You would soon cease to fancy you loved me. I—it so happens—have never begun to fancy I loved you. That is fortunate for us both."
"Armstrong!" he exclaimed. And suddenly, despite his ruddy coloring, he suggested a dark Sicilian hate peering from an ambush, stiletto in impatient hand.
"Don't show me that side of you, Boris," she entreated. "Whether it is Armstrong or not, did I not say the fact that I don't fancy I love you is fortunate for us both?"
"You love Armstrong," he insisted sullenly.
"How can you know that, when I don't know it myself?" replied she. "As I told you once before, the only matter that concerns you is that I do not love you." She spoke sharply. Knowing him so well, she had small patience with his childish, barbaric moods; she could not bear pettiness in a man really and almost entirely great. "Will you be yourself?" she demanded, earnest beneath her smiling manner. "How can I talk to you seriously if you act like a spoiled, bad boy? If you'll only think about the matter, as I've been compelled to think about it, you'll see that you don't really love me—that I'm not the woman for you at all. We'd aggravate each other's worst. What you need is a woman like Narcisse."
"You are most kind," he said sarcastically.