“It’s an unholy den for anything to spend its days in—that third floor,” he made the statement detachedly, in a way. “If she’s six, she has lived six years there—and known nothing else.”
“All London top floors are like it,” said Feather, “and they are all nurseries and school rooms—where there are children.”
His faintly smiling glance took in her girl-child slimness in its glittering sheath—the zephyr scarf floating from the snow of her bared loveliness—her delicate soft chin deliciously lifted as she looked up at him.
“How would you like it?” he asked.
“But I am not a child,” in pretty protest. “Children are—are different!”
“You look like a child,” he suddenly said, queerly—as if the aspect of her caught him for an instant and made him absent-minded. “Sometimes—a woman does. Not often.”
She bloomed into a kind of delighted radiance.
“You don’t often pay me compliments,” she said. “That is a beautiful one. Robin—makes it more beautiful.”
“It isn’t a compliment,” he answered, still watching her in the slightly absent manner. “It is—a tragic truth.”
He passed his hand lightly across his eyes as if he swept something away, and then both looked and spoke exactly as before.