And then he began to talk in his low deliberate caressing voice, while his piercing eyes wandered up and down her. "You are excited, my dear child, and I am not astonished. When two people such as we are find themselves for the first time absolutely alone together, they are apt to betray their emotions. Don't be ashamed of yours.... The tie that has bound us together is so subtle and delicate an understanding--the magnetic fluid between us is of such a rare and fleeting nature--" "Yes, very fleeting," thought Lilly---- "that it really would be a pity if we did not taste and enjoy it to the dregs. Any restraint of feeling might easily prove a hindrance on your side, as well as on my own, to the full rapture of this hour of spiritual hedonism."
He almost smacked his lips as he said this, and rocked from side to side. Lilly thought of the refrain of a Viennese song in her repertoire: "I have much too much feeling."
"He has much too much," she said to herself, and she could not help a smile flitting across her face.
He saw the smile, which she tried to hide by bending her head, and he misinterpreted it.
"There is a delightful virginal coyness about you," he said, with an admiring oscillation of his head, "that never fails to excite my wonder."
"Oh, you mountebank!" thought Lilly, and smiled again.
Now he was slightly perplexed, for his wide and varied experience had taught him something. He shot at her from under his lids a glance of suspicion and thwarted greed.
"Or have you," he continued, "kept over for to-day some of the charmingly graceful humour which you developed last night with such unexpected élan?"
"I may have," she replied, with an upward glance which was almost arch.
"Most excellent!" he cried, his face breaking into a roguish smile in which there was a touch of devilry. "Are you, then, one of those who know how to laugh in your sleeve at--how shall I express it?--the whole farce and hypocrisy of it all ... at yourself too, my child--at yourself, mind; that is the main point, ... If so, you and I are one, one in body and soul ... nothing divides us any more ... then ..."