He made no reply, although a quiver crossed his lips. Then, after a little, “It's astonishing how soon you get used to things. Seems as if I had been here for years, and this is only the third time.'”
“Have you thought any more of California?”
He faced her with an expression of surprise. “It had gone clean out of my mind. I suppose I will shift back, though—nothing here for me. I can't come to see you every evening.”
She preserved a silence in which they both fell to staring into a dancing, bluish flame. The gusts of rain were audible like the tearing of heavy linen. An extraordinary idea had taken possession of Honora—if the day had been fine, if she had been out in a sparkling air and sun, a very great deal would have happened differently. But just what she couldn't then say: the fact alone was all that she curiously apprehended.
“I suppose not,” she answered, so long after his last statement that he gazed questioningly at her. “I wonder if it has occurred to you,” she continued, “how much alike we are? I often think about it.”
“Why, no,” he replied, “it hasn't. Jason Bur-rage and Honora Canderay! I wouldn't have guessed it, and I don't believe any one else ever has. I'd have a hard time thinking about two more different. It's—it's ridiculous.” He became seriously animated. “Here I am—well, you know all about me—with some money, perhaps, and a little of the world in my head; but you're Honora Canderay.”
“You said once that I was nothing but a woman,” she reminded him.
“I remember that,” he admitted with evident chagrin. “I was drunk.”
“That's when the truth is often hit on; I am quite an ordinary sort of woman.”
He laughed indulgently.