"Never!" she shook her head with an indignant protest, "and you?" she added softly after a moment.
"And I? What?"
"Without me could you have felt it quite like this?"
She waited breathlessly, but the ironic spirit had got the better of his tenderness.
"My dear girl," he rejoined, "what a question?"
"But could you?—tell me," she implored in sudden passion.
"Well, I devoutly hope so," he answered lightly, "it's a thing I should'nt like to have missed, you know."
He leaned back closing his eyes; and immediately, without warning and against his will, there rose before him the seductive face of Madame Alta, and he recalled her exquisite voice, with its peculiar high note of piercing sweetness. Then he remembered his wife, and, one by one, the other women whom he had loved and forgotten or merely forgotten without loving. They meant so little in his existence now, and yet once, each in her own bad time had engrossed utterly his senses. In what rare quality of sentiment could this love differ from those lesser loves that had gone before?
But he was not given to introspection, and so the disturbing question left him almost as readily as it had come. When one attempted to think things out, there was no hope of escaping the endless circle with a clear head. No, he wasn't analytical, thank Heaven!
While he was still rejoicing in what he called his "practical turn of mind," he remembered suddenly an appointment at his club which he had made a week ago and then overlooked in the absorbing interest of his engagement.