“You don’t!” she honestly answered; after which, as to attenuate a little the rigour of the charge: “You don’t comfortably look it, I mean. You don’t look”—she was very serious—“as I want you to.”
It was when she was most serious that she was funniest. “How do you ‘want’ me to look?”
She endeavoured, while he watched her, to make up her mind, but seemed only, after an instant, to recognise a difficulty. “When you look at me, you’re all right!” she sighed. It was an obstacle to her lesson, and she cast her eyes about. “Look at that chimneypiece.”
“Well——?” he inquired as his eyes came back from it.
“You mean to say it isn’t lovely?”
He returned to it without passion—gave a vivid sign of mere disability. “I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t mean to say anything. I’m a rank outsider.”
It had an instant effect on her—she almost pounced upon him. “Then you must let me put you up!”
“Up to what?”
“Up to everything!”—his levity added to her earnestness. “You were smoking when you came in,” she said as she glanced about. “Where’s your cigarette?”
The young man appreciatively produced another. “I thought perhaps I mightn’t—here.”