She put the flowers to her face and held them there a second.
"The one thing I should warn you against," she said, "would be against believing me. I don't make the mistake of believing myself."
She put the flowers down.
"You think I am trying to deceive you," she said. "There would have to be a reason for my doing it. What should you think would be the reason?"
"So help me God!" he answered, "I don't know."
"Neither do I," she said.
Then she glanced about her over the room,—at Planefield, rather restively professing to occupy himself with a pretty girl; at Miss Varien, turned a trifle sidewise in her large chair so that her beautiful sleeve was displayed to the most perfect advantage, and her vivacious face was a little uplifted as she spoke to Richard, who leaned on the high back of her seat; at Arbuthnot, talking to Agnes Sylvestre, and plainly at no loss of words; at the lights and flowers and ornamented tables seen through the portières,—and then she spoke again.
"I tell you," she said, "it is this that is real—this. The other was only a kind of dream."
She made a sudden movement and sat upright on her chair, as if she meant to shake herself free from something.
"There was no other," she said. "It wasn't even a dream. There never was anything but this."