"Well, I'm not sure I'm so charmed." He spoke as if he had thought this particular question over for himself; he had his way of being lucid without brightness. "I'm not at all easily charmed, you know," he the next moment added; "and I'm not a fellow who goes about much after women."
"Ah, that I never supposed! Why in the world should you? It's the last thing!" I laughed. "But isn't this—quite (what shall one call it?) innocently—rather a peculiar case?"
My question produced in him a little gesture of elation—a gesture emphasised by a snap of his forefinger and thumb. "I knew you knew it was special! I knew you've been thinking about it!"
"You certainly," I replied with assurance, "have, during the last five minutes, made me do so with some sharpness. I don't pretend that I don't now recognise that there must be something the matter. I only desire—not unnaturally—that there should be, to put me in the right for having thought, if, as you're so sure, such a freedom as that can be brought home to me. If Mrs. Server is beautiful and gentle and strange," I speciously went on, "what are those things but an attraction?"
I saw how he had them, whatever they were, before him as he slowly shook his head. "They're not an attraction. They're too queer."
I caught in an instant my way to fall in with him; and not the less that I by this time felt myself committed, up to the intellectual eyes, to ascertaining just how queer the person under discussion might be. "Oh, of course I'm not speaking of her as a party to a silly flirtation, or an object of any sort of trivial pursuit. But there are so many different ways of being taken."
"For a fellow like you. But not for a fellow like me. For me there's only one."
"To be, you mean, in love?"
He put it a little differently. "Well, to be thoroughly pleased."
"Ah, that's doubtless the best way and the firm ground. And you mean you're not thoroughly pleased with Mrs. Server?"