“Oh, I say it—but hasn’t my whole point been that I don’t ask you to. Therefore,” she demanded—but smiling at him now—“where’s the logic?”
“Oh, the logic—!” he laughed.
“But logic’s everything. That, at least, is how I feel it. A ricordo from you—from you to me—is a ricordo of nothing. It has no reference.”
“Ah, my dear!” he vaguely protested. Their entertainer, meanwhile, stood there with his eyes on them, and the girl, though at this minute more interested in her passage with her friend than in anything else, again met his gaze. It was a comfort to her that their foreign tongue covered what they said—and they might have appeared of course, as the Prince now had one of the snuffboxes in his hand, to be discussing a purchase.
“You don’t refer,” she went on to her companion. “I refer.”
He had lifted the lid of his little box and he looked into it hard. “Do you mean by that then that you would be free—?”
“‘Free’—?”
“To offer me something?”
This gave her a longer pause, and when she spoke again she might have seemed, oddly, to be addressing the dealer. “Would you allow me—?”
“No,” said the Prince into his little box.