"You used to laugh like that when I first knew you," he said involuntarily. She knew that he had spoken without reflection, and she laughed again with pleasure. It was always a triumph to surprise him into spontaneity.
"How jolly it was in those days! Do you remember our tea in the orchard, how we watched Aunt Esther out of the front door, and then brought the things out through the back door?"
"Yes; and how you spilt the milk, and cook wouldn't let you have any more, and our second cups were spoilt?"
"Rather! And how you shocked Dorcas—"
"Ah," sighed Paul; "we can never do those delightful things again. We know one another too well, now."
They allowed themselves to become almost depressed, for the space of a moment, because they knew one another so well. "All the same," observed Katharine, "there is still one joy left to us. We can quarrel."
He became conventional again as he rang the bell for her at number ten, Queen's Crescent, Marylebone. He raised his hat, and gently pressed her hand, and supposed he should see her again soon. And Katharine, who was occupied in hoping that he did not notice the squalor of the area, and would not come inside the dull, distempered hall, only said that she supposed so too; and then blamed herself hotly, as he drove away, for not responding more warmly.
"He will think I don't want to see him again," she thought wearily, as she dragged herself up the uncarpeted stairs, and went into her dark and dingy cubicle. It had never seemed so dark or so dingy before; and she added miserably to herself, "I had better not see him again, perhaps. It makes it all so much worse afterwards."
She would have been surprised had she known what Paul really was thinking about her.
"She is more of a study than ever," he said to the cab horse. "Still so much of the innocent pose about her, with just that indication of added knowledge that is so fascinating to a man. She'll do, now she has got away from her depressing relations; and the touch of weirdness in her expression is an improvement. Wonder if Heaton would call her a schoolgirl now? It was quite finished, the careless way she said good-bye, as though it were of no consequence to her at all. Yes; she is a study."