"Oh!" he said, with a wave of his hand at the enclosing wall of cliff and the empty vastness of the sea, "this teeming beach, the fashionable resort behind it, the chaperon at our elbow!"
She glanced at him with a shy smile.
"Oh, not in that way," she said; "besides you couldn't help yourself; you were brought. No, one sees it mostly in the things you say."
"In the things I say?"
"Well, no! perhaps, in the things you don't say."
"I see!" he mused, with the same air of banter, "the desert areas of omission! Others made them blossom for you like the rose? I don't succeed in even expressing things that were commonplaces with them?"
"What sort of things?" she asked, her eyes again upon the sand.
"Oh, you know them probably, better than I," he said; "being a woman and used to them."
"To what?"
"To the ordinary masculine fatuities of admiration, for instance."