“I wonder.... Have you ever been crazily in love, Jeanne?”
“I don't know. There was a boy in Laon named Marcelin. But I was a little fool then. The last news of him was from Verdun.”
“Have you had many... like I am?”
“How sentimental we are,” she cried laughing.
“No. I wanted to know. I know so little of life,” said Andrews.
“I have amused myself, as best I could,” said Jeanne in a serious tone. “But I am not frivolous.... There have been very few men I have liked.... So I have had few friends... do you want to call them lovers? But lovers are what married women have on the stage.... All that sort of thing is very silly.”
“Not so very long ago,” said Andrews, “I used to dream of being romantically in love, with people climbing up the ivy on castle walls, and fiery kisses on balconies in the moonlight.”
“Like at the Opera Comique,” cried Jeanne laughing.
“That was all very silly. But even now, I want so much more of life than life can give.”
They leaned over the parapet and listened to the hurrying swish of the river, now soft and now loud, where the reflections of the lights on the opposite bank writhed like golden snakes.