'It's odd you should have chosen this place,' said he.
'Odd? Why?' She looked at him inquiringly. For a moment their eyes held each other; and all at once the blood swept through him with suffocating violence. She was so beautiful, so sumptuous, so warmly and richly feminine; and surely the circumstances were not anodyne. Her softly rounded face, its very pallor, the curve and colour of her lips, her luminous dark eyes, the smooth modulations of her voice, and then her loose abundance of black hair, and the swelling lines of her breast, the fluent contour of her waist and hips, under the fine black cloth of her dress—all these, with the silence of the forest, the heat of the southern day, the woodland fragrances of which the air was full, and the sense of being intimately alone with her, set up within him a turbulent vibration, half of delight, half of pained suspense. And the complaisant informality with which she met him played a sustaining counterpoint. 'What luck, what luck, what luck,' were the words which shaped themselves to the strong beating of his pulses. What would happen next? Whither would it lead? He had savoured the bouquet, he was famished to taste the wine. And yet, so complicated are our human feelings, he was obscurely vexed. Only two kinds of woman, he would have maintained yesterday, could conceivably do a thing like this: an ingénue or 'that sort.' She wasn't an ingénue. Something, at the same time, half assured him that she wasn't 'that sort,' either. But—the circumstances! The situation!
'Why odd?' she repeated.
'Oh, I don't want to talk about the Queen,' he said, in a smothered voice.
'The oddity relates itself to the Queen?'
'Oh, this is where we used to waste half our lives when we were children. That's all. This was our favourite nook.'
'Perfect then for the story you're going to tell me.'
'What story?'
'You said it was a long story.'
'There's really no story at all.' His eyes were fastened upon her hands, small and tapering, in their tan gauntlets. The point of a patent-leather boot glanced from the edge of her skirt. A short gold watch-chain dangled from her breast, a cluster of charms at the end.