"No—no—nothing—" with exaggerated naturalness. "I only wanted to talk to you."
"Wasn't Jimmie cunning!" she laughed, slipping into a chair. "He says he is going to be a writer like Mark Twain and let you sell his books. This environment, he says, is enough to make a writer of any fellow." I laughed.
"Tell me, Alicia—" I began briskly enough, and then, noting her eyes upon me, those deep eyes of a woman, I faltered:
"Do you—did you—when did this love affair between you and Randolph begin?"
Alicia made no answer.
"Was it sudden—spontaneous—like that?" and I snapped my fingers, still clinging to the spirit of lightness with which we had left the table.
"I have loved all of them—always," she murmured, gazing downward, "ever since I've been with them."
"I know that—so have I—so do I—" and my laugh sounded in my own ears like the grating of rough metallic surfaces together. "But I don't go marrying you all—do I? That's a very serious business, Alicia, this marrying."
How dull and prosy the words fell upon the air about me! Does middle age mean being prosy when you mean to be alert, bright and crisp? Yet I feel younger than any of them.
Her face lifting slowly and her wide-open gray eyes searching mine suddenly struck me as so piteously sad that I then and there wrote myself down an ass and a cad and turned away to hide my shame.