She put out her lips, and wagged her head a little, in a gesture which it flashed across him his own mirror might often have recorded. “I thought that was all settled and done with long ago,” she said, moodily.
“Oh, I won't worry you with it, Lou,” he observed, with reassuring kindness of tone. “I never felt so much like being nice to you in my life.”
She seemed surprised at this, too, and regarded him with a heavy new fixity of gaze. No verbal comment, apparently, occurred to her.
“Julia and Alfred all right?” he queried, cheerfully.
“I daresay,” she made brief answer.
“But they write to you, don't they?”
“SHE does—sometimes. They seem to be doing themselves very well, from what she says.”
“She'd write oftener, if you'd answer her letters,” he told her, in tones of confidential reproach.
“Oh, I don't write letters unless I've got something to say,” she answered, as if the explanation were ample.
The young people were domiciled for the time being at Dusseldorf, where Alfred had thought he would most like to begin his Continental student-career, and where Julia, upon the more or less colourable pretext of learning the language, might enjoy the mingled freedom and occupation of a home of her own. They had taken a house for the summer and autumn, and would do the same in Dresden or Munich, later on, for the winter.