He laughed as if the idea still delighted him, and she laughed with him.
"I'd like to have told him that," he continued, almost meditatively. "But I'll bet he often thought of it himself. I guess he wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than that."
When he stopped they stood a moment smiling at each other. Then she went back to the couch with rather a businesslike air.
"How old are you?" she asked.
"I'm twenty-four. How old are you?"
She smiled, quite disarmed by the artlessness of this brutality.
"I am twenty-seven."
"That's pretty old, isn't it?" he commented, gravely. "I shouldn't have said you were older than I am. Some ways you look younger. And what a lot you must have seen out yonder!"
"You should go there yourself, to work, to study." She felt that he was curiously watching her lips as she spoke rather than listening to her.
"Now I see it's only your profile that's sad," he began in the same detached, absent way he had spoken of the books, the way of one talking in solitude. "Your full face isn't sad; it's full of joy; but there's a droop to the profile. Here—I'll show you." He took a sketch-book from the table.