"I've been here about six times in all," he answered, "but my enthusiasm is still in fine order. It's ready to break forth at any minute. If you want, Miss Twining, we can have a combined eruption this evening."
Claire thought this clever; it had so fresh a sound after the blunt fun she had long heard; it made her think a little of the way Beverley Thurston phrased his ideas, though any resemblance between the two men could only exist for her in the large generic sense that they were both gentlemen. She laughed, with a note of real glee among the liquid trebles of her mirth. It seemed to her that she had already got to know Mr. Hollister quite well. And yet they were still such strangers! She had still so much to learn regarding him!
"I'm glad you've nothing to say against this delightful island," she declared, as if mildly jubilant over the discovery. "I heard a man on the sands talking about it to a friend only a few mornings ago. He was a shabby man who wanted shaving, and I'm not sure that he had on any collar. I think he must have been a kind of philosopher. He said that Coney Island was an immense fact. There is just my opinion—that it is an immense fact." They were now but a slight distance from the foamy, rolling plash of the dark sea-waves. The music came to them in bursts of softer richness. With her arm still in that of her companion, Claire half turned toward the hotel, starred with countless lights, and looking, as it rose above the vague throngs beneath it, like some palace of dreamy legend, lit for festival.
"I often think that this mere strip of sand must be so surprised," she continued, "to find itself grown suddenly important and famous after it has lain here lonely, almost unnoticed, for long centuries. I sometimes fancy that I can hear the waves talk to it as they break on its shore, and ask it what is meant by this wonderful change."
"That's a very pretty way of looking at the matter," replied Hollister, while he gazed down into her face from his considerably taller height with a keener expression of interest and charm than he himself guessed. "Perhaps the waves congratulate Coney Island on its final success in life, and gently quote to it the old proverb about everything coming to those who know how to wait."
Claire started. "Do you believe that?" she said. "Does everything come to those who know how to wait?"
Hollister laughed again. "You talk as if you had been waiting. But I'm sure it can't have been for very long."
This last sentence was put at least half in the form of a question. But she evaded it, saying with a light little toss of the head: "Hasn't everybody always something to wait for, between youth and old age?"
"Tell me something about your expectations, won't you?" he asked, with the non-committal tenderness of a man whose acquaintanceship has been too brief for any serious depth to accompany his words. "You can't think how much I wish that I was one of them."
"One of my expectations? You?"