She looked at me with a spice of mischief in her eyes. “Why?” she asked.
It was a tempting opening for a flirtation, but I could not flirt with her. When I had first heard the clear, soft tones of her voice at the window, I must have known that my meeting with her was a new and decisive experience. I had always idealised a certain type of woman, and perhaps for that reason I had always held back from the possible disillusions of an exploring intimacy. But my recognition of Anne had nothing in common with all my old deliberately romantic searchings for a theoretical affinity. If I had been asked at any time before two o’clock that morning to define my ideal, the definition would not have described Anne. Indeed, I could never have imagined her. She was altogether too individual, too positive, too independently real, to fit the mawkish vapourings of a man’s imaginary woman. There was something about her that conquered me. Already I was blushingly ashamed of my jealous suspicion that she could sell herself by a marriage with Jervaise. In all her moods, she appeared to me with an effect that I can only describe as “convincing.”
She was a perpetual revelation, and each new phase of her thrilled me with admiration, and a sense of long-sought satisfaction. I could be content to watch and to listen to her. The revelations of her personality were to me as a continual and glorious adventure. To flirt with her would be a confession on my part of a kind of superiority that I could never feel; a suggestion of the ridiculous assumption that I could afford to dally with and in certain circumstances flout her. I could sooner have dallied with and flouted a supreme work of art. Wherefore when she challenged me with her daring “Why?” I met her eyes with a look that if it in any way represented what I was feeling, must have expressed a grave and sincere humility.
“I can hardly tell you why,” I said. “I can only assure you that I am profoundly interested.”
She accepted that statement with a readiness that gave me another thrill of satisfaction. She understood my desire and gave way to it, instantly fulfilling my present need of her.
“My great-grandfather went back to Paris after things had settled down,” she went on, as if there had been no break in her narrative; “just as a common workman. He was about thirty-five, then, I believe; his first wife and his two children had died of small-pox in Holland, and he didn’t marry again until he was sixty. He had only one child afterwards; that was my grandmother. But I can’t tell you the story properly. You must get my mother to do that. She makes such a lovely romance out of it. And it is rather romantic, too, isn’t it? I like to feel that I’ve got that behind me rather than all the stodgy old ancestors the Jervaises have got. Wouldn’t you?”
“Rather,” I agreed warmly.
“If I didn’t miss all the important points you’d think so,” Anne replied with a little childish pucker of perplexity coming in her forehead. “But story-telling isn’t a bit in my line. I wish it were. I can listen to mother for hours, and I can never make out quite what it is she does to make her stories so interesting. Of course she generally tells them in French, which helps, but I’m no better in French than in English. Mother has a way of saying ‘Enfin’ or ‘En effet’ that in itself is quite thrilling.”
“You don’t know quite how well you do it yourself,” I said.
She shook her head. “Not like mother,” she asserted. With that childish pucker still wrinkling her forehead she looked like a little girl of fourteen. I could see her gazing up at her mother with some little halting perplexed question. I felt as if she were giving me some almost miraculous confidence, obliterating all the strangeness of new acquaintanceship by displaying the story of her girlhood.