He looked over to where her voice came from, but there wasn't anything visible except a little dark heap on the last three stairs.
"I could tell better if I could see you," he stated pleasantly. "Don't you want to take the hint?"
But Joy, mindful of the hanging braids that would certainly make him think she was a little girl, would not take it at all. She snuggled against the wall.
"Oh, you can see me any time," she said carelessly, "but you can scarcely ever get to talk to me. At least, I heard somebody say so last month."
She felt quite like somebody else, a gay, teasing, careless sort of real girl, talking to him here in the dark. She was sure she wouldn't if the lights were on. She could talk to him as if he were some one out of a book or a story, so long as he didn't know she looked like a book-person or a play-person herself.
"Well, anyway, do let me stay here," he begged, doing it. "For the last hour I haven't felt as if it was much of a privilege to be me, either. Do you know that feeling of terrible personal unworthiness you get at a party where everybody knows everybody else and nobody knows you? I feel like precisely the kind of long, wiggly worm the little boy ate."
Joy felt very sorry for him; because if she didn't know that feeling she knew one to match it; having everybody know her and nobody think of playing with her.... This man was playing with her for a minute, anyway.
"And I'll always have him to remember," she thought happily, "even when I'm an old, old lady, writing reminiscences of Grandfather, the way they all say I should ..." She went off into a little daydream of writing all this down in her reminiscences, and having him—old, too, then—write back to her and say that he, also, had always remembered the time happily, and wondered who she was.... Then she answered him.
"You know me, anyway—don't say you know no one," she told him. "Anyway, I'm glad you're talking to me. I'm Joy."
He laughed again, leaning against the door-frame in the thread of light.