"It sounds so foolish when I say it—so priggish! But it's this: I don't at all approve of you. Why in the world should I care? I don't know. It isn't my business to reform you, if you need it." Now she had brought it out, she could not look at him.
Curiously enough, though he had been amused at her assumption of a circumstantial knowledge of him, this hinted comprehension of his character, of the duplicity of his life, if it were that, impressed him with the existence in her mind of some quality as rare and mysterious as electricity, a real psychic gift, perhaps. It gave him an instant's pause. Instinctively he feared a more definite arraignment. He began a little more seriously, now, to match his cleverness against her intuition; and, for the first defense, he employed a move of masculine coquetry.
"You have been thinking of me, then?"
"Yes," she replied simply, "I have thought about you a good deal since I was in your studio. But I suppose you're used to hearing things like that from women." She was apologetic, rather than sarcastic.
He shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to be able to make no way against her directness. "I've thought not a little of you, too, Miss Payson. You are wonderfully psychic and sensitive. I think you should develop your power—you might be able to do extraordinary things with it. I wish you'd let me help you. That is," he added humorously, "if I'm not too far gone in your disapproval."
"Oh, the disapproval—I call it that for want of a better word—isn't so important as the fact that I should feel it at all, don't you see? You remember that you told me I was the kind of a woman who, if she liked a man, would tell him so, freely. That is true. I would scorn to stoop to the immemorial feminine tricks. I do like you, and in spite of what I can't quite explain, too. I don't know why, either. It seems as if it's a part of that other feeling I've mentioned—that I've been with you, or near you, before."
He leaned forward to extort more of this delicious confession from her. "Do you mean spiritually, or merely physically near?"
"Oh, I don't mean an 'elective affinity' or anything so occult as that," she laughed. "Indeed, I don't quite know what I do mean—it's all so vague. I can't formulate it. It escapes me when I try. But I did know, for instance, quite definitely, that I'd see you again. I tell you about it only because I think that you, with your power in that way, may be able to understand it and explain it to me."
He thought he saw his chance, now, and instinctively he began to pose, letting his eyes deepen and burn on her. He nodded his head and said impressively:
"Yes. I have felt it, too, Miss Payson. It's wonderful to think that you should have recognized me and understood me so well. No one ever has before. We are related by some tie—I'm sure we've met before, somewhere, somehow—"