The last words of Alice confused me.... I did not know what to say.
‘I was kept,’ she went on; ‘I was watched.’
‘Who could keep you?’
‘Where would you like to go?’ inquired Alice, as usual not answering my question.
‘Take me to Italy—to that lake, you remember.’
Alice turned a little away, and shook her head in refusal. At that point I noticed for the first time that she had ceased to be transparent. And her face seemed tinged with colour; there was a faint glow of red over its misty whiteness. I glanced at her eyes ... and felt a pang of dread; in those eyes something was astir—with the slow, continuous, malignant movement of the benumbed snake, twisting and turning as the sun begins to thaw it.
‘Alice,’ I cried, ‘who are you? Tell me who you are.’
Alice simply shrugged her shoulders.
I felt angry ... I longed to punish her; and suddenly the idea occurred to me to tell her to fly with me to Paris. ‘That’s the place for you to be jealous,’ I thought. ‘Alice,’ I said aloud, ‘you are not afraid of big towns—Paris, for instance?’
‘No.’