"I took the liberty of sending you a few verses, which I hope you accepted in the spirit in which they were written--merely as an exercise in style, without any special application or significance."
"He is cooling already," her consciousness of guilt told her. And so all the colder and more unconcerned was her answer.
"Your pretty lines did rather surprise me at first, as I couldn't conceive why they should be addressed to me, but afterwards it occurred to me that it might be what you have just said it was, and I did not mind. If you don't object, I would rather not talk about it any more."
He gazed at her with eyes dilated from amazement, and she was glad that she had driven her thrust home with such bitterness.
Next she asked him if he would have supper with her, as she wished to do the right thing, though nothing had been prepared for a guest.
"I thought that I had been given permission to call for you and take you out," he said in a cold, disillusioned tone.
She smiled graciously. "If you wish, I shall be happy to come," she said.
In silence they descended the staircase, in silence they walked along the bank of the canal the same path that they had taken, in such rapturous proximity to each other, three evenings ago. They had been silent then, but what a different silence it had been from this.
"What have you been doing the last few days?" she asked, for the sake of saying something.
"Nothing special," he replied. He had been trying to write an article for a Munich art paper, to which he was a contributor, on the subject of the Siennese School outside Sienna. But he hadn't succeeded. His editor wouldn't be satisfied with his stuff.