“Ah! I remember I gave you some advice,” he exclaimed with suspicious abruptness. “I thought afterward that it was great presumption on my part.”
“I wonder if you had an ideal of your own in mind when you spoke?”
“An ideal?” He cursed his memory and floundered hopelessly. Even his Irish wit for once deserted him.
“Oh, I hoped you had not forgotten it. Why, I have made a little ‘Night Thoughts’ of what you said, and it has been one of the strongest forces in my development. Shall I repeat it to you?”
“Oh, please.” He was blushing with pleasure, but sore perplexed.
And she repeated his comments and advice, word for word.
“Is it possible that you remember all that? I am deeply flattered.” And he was, in fact.
“What more natural than that I should remember? I was a lonely little waif, full of dreams and vague ideals, and with much that was terrible in my actual life. I had never talked with a young man before—a man of seventy was my only experience of your sex, barring boys, that don’t count. And you swooped down into my life in the most picturesque manner possible, and talked as no one in my little world was capable of talking. So, you see, it is not so remarkable that I retain a vivid impression of you and your words. I was frightfully in love with you.”
“Oh—were you? Were you?” He was very much at sea. It was true that she had paid him the most subtle tribute one mind can pay to another, but her very audacity would go to prove that she was a brilliant coquette. He had a keen sense of the ridiculous, and he was still a little afraid of her. He took refuge on the broad impersonal shore of flirtation, where the boat is ever dancing on the waves.
“If you felt obliged to use the past tense you might have left that last unsaid.”