"But you don't really believe in such superstitions, and it surely is very wrong."
He looked at her incredulously, as he might at some beautiful apparition likely at any moment to vanish from his sight, then reverentially drew her towards him and kissed her. Her hand was laid on his shoulder, and in a delicious apprehension she stood looking at him.
"Where shall we sit?"
He threw some books and papers from a long cane chair, and she lay down in it. He sat on the arm, and then tried to talk.
"Let me take your hat."
She unpinned it, and he placed it on the piano.
His room was lighted by two square windows looking on the open space in front of the square, where the vagrant children gathered in noisy groups round a dripping iron fountain. The floor was covered with grey-green drugget, and near the fireplace, drawn in front of the window, was a large oak table covered with papers of various kinds. Against the end wall there was a bookcase, and there were shelves filled with books. There were two arm-chairs, a piano, and some prints of Blake's illustrations to Dante on the wall. The writing table, covered with manuscript music, roused Evelyn's curiosity. She glanced down a page of orchestration, and then picked up the first pages of an article, and having read them she said—
"How severe you are in your articles. You are gentler in your music, more like yourself; but I see your servant does not waste her time dusting your books ...and that is your bedroom, may I see it?"
He looked at her abashed. "I am afraid my room will seem to you very unluxurious. I have read of prima donnas' bed-rooms."
But the bare simplicity of the room did not displease her; it seemed to her more natural to sleep in a low, narrow bed like his, than in fine linen and eiderdown quilts, and she liked the scant, bleak furniture, the two chairs, the iron wash-hand stand, and the window curtained with a bit of Indian muslin. They stood talking, hardly knowing what they were saying. Her eyes embarrassed him, and she stopped in the middle of a sentence.