"I admire your perfect stillness," he said at last, after there had been a pause of a moment or two. "I have never seen a woman sit so still. It is a great quality."
"I was not allowed to fidget when I was young," I said. "Perhaps one acquires repose as a habit."
"When you were young! Why, you look only a baby now! I would take you for about eighteen years old, and that is what interests me. Your eyes have a question and a story in them that is not usual at eighteen."
"Oh, I am ever so much older than that! I must be at least fifty!" I said.
He smiled. "I am fifty. It is a terrible age."
"I dare say it would be nice to be fifty if one had been long enough young—to get there gradually. But to jump there, that is what is not amusing."
"And you have jumped to fifty? I thought there was a story in those
Sphinx eyes."
"Why do you say that? You are the second person who has said I have the eyes of the Sphinx. I would like to know why?" I asked.
"Because they are inscrutable. They suggest much and reveal nothing.
It would interest me deeply to hear your impression of things."
"What things?"