Nellie did not reply at once, but began plaiting her fingers together with the little finger on the top. They were slender and small like her face, which narrowed very rapidly from the ears downwards to a pointed chin. Loose yellow hair, the colour of honey, grew low over her forehead, and just below it, her eyebrows, noticeably darker than her hair, made high arches, giving her face an expression of irony and surprise. Her forehead ran straight into the line of her nose, and a short upper lip held her mouth in imperfect control, for it hinted and wondered, and was amused and contemptuous as its mood took it. Now it half-smiled; now it was half serious, but always it only hinted.
Peter apparently grew impatient of her silence and her finger plaiting.
“You’re making them look like bananas on a street-barrow,” he observed.
Nellie smoothed them out and gave an appreciative sigh.
“Oh, I bought two to-day,” she said, “and ate them in the street. I had to throw the skins away, and then I was afraid that somebody would slip on them and break his leg.”
“So you picked them up again,” suggested Peter.
“No, I didn’t. I was only sorry for anybody who might slip on them. I couldn’t tell who it was going to be, and probably I shouldn’t know him——”
“Get on,” he said.
“Oh, about Philip. Well, there it was. He asked me, you see, and—of course, he’s rather old, but he’s tremendously attractive. And it’s so safe and pleasant, and I like being adored. After all, you and I have talked it over often enough, and you knew just as well as I did that I was going to accept him if he wanted me.”
Nellie suddenly felt that she was justifying what she had done, and she did not mean to do that. What she had done justified itself by its own inherent good sense. She changed her tone, and began counting on those slim fingers which just now had introduced the extraneous subject of bananas.