She had suddenly become very much a girl, with the light of a feminine magic gleaming in her mischievous eyes.
“Are you flirting with me?” he demanded.
“How did you guess?” she asked.
The orchestra struck up again.
“Shall we dance?” she said, jumping up from the table.
“Yes,” he said. “Do you know, the last time I danced with you, I had been drinking, and thought I was dancing with a childhood playmate.”
“Aren’t I your childhood playmate?” she asked pausing at the edge of the dancing space.
“No, Serpent of the Nile,” he said, taking her in his arms. “And you aren’t a dryad, either,” he went on, as they mingled with the dancers. “You are a water-witch, that’s what you are. You dance like water in the sunlight. You are an exhalation from the salt sea wave. You have no body—which is even worse than having no soul; if I knew the proper magic words to pronounce, this which seems to be your body would dissolve, and I would hold in my arms only a handful of shining mist. You are really not here at all—there is no one here but me, talking to myself. In fact, now I think you must be somebody that I invented in a fanciful mood—a quite imaginary person.”
“You seem to have a number of contradictory theories about me,” she said.
“Yes—the only thing I am quite sure of is that you don’t really exist.”