She was watching him with her head a little on one side, now, and a smile struggling forth from her would-be serious lips. She was recollecting how much she had always liked him, and considering how much she would surely like him hereafter, in this renewal of their old half-cousinly and half-flirtatious intimacy. She was thinking what deeps of characteristic drollery slept in him—with what a quiet, funny sort of martyrdom he had borne her little girlish despotisms, before that sudden marriage had wrought so sharp a rupture of their relations, and how often he had forced her into unwilling laughter by the slow and almost sleepy humor with which he had successfully parried some of her most vigorous attacks.
"I merely wanted to ask you," he now said, "where all these extraordinary individuals are to be found."
"Ah, that is an important question, certainly," she said, with a solemn inclination—or at least the semblance of one. "I intend to collect them."
"Good gracious! You speak of them as if they were minerals or mummies that you were going to get together for a museum. I have no doubt that they will be curiosities, by the bye."
"I am afraid you will find them so."
"Are they to be imported?"
"Oh, no. That will not be necessary."
"I see; they're domestic products."
"Quite so. In this great city—filled with so much energy, so much re-action against the narrow feudalisms of Europe—I am very certain of finding them." She paused for a moment, and seemed to employ a tacit interval for the accumulation of what she next said. "I shall not be entirely unassisted in my search, either."
A cunning twinkle became manifest in the brown eyes of her listener. He drew a long breath. "Ah! now we get at the root of the matter. There's a confederate—an accomplice, so to speak."