“I'd rather look round. It's curious, isn't it?”
“Curious? It's heavenly! It's the one thing I am going to take back to America with me—one coffee-house, one dozen military men for local color, one dozen students ditto, and one proprietor's wife to sit in the cage and shortchange the unsuspecting. I'll grow wealthy.”
“But what about the medical practice?”
He leaned over toward her; his dark-gray eyes fulfilled the humorous promise of his mouth.
“Why, it will work out perfectly,” he said whimsically. “The great American public will eat cinnamon cakes and drink coffee until the feeble American nervous system will be shattered. I shall have an office across the street!”
After that, having seen how tired she looked, he forbade conversation until she had had her coffee. She ate the cakes, too, and he watched her with comfortable satisfaction.
“Nod your head but don't speak,” he said. “Remember, I am prescribing, and there's to be no conversation until the coffee is down. Shall I or shall I not open the cheese?”
But Harmony did not wish the cheese, and so signified. Something inherently delicate in the unknown kept him from more than an occasional swift glance at her. He read aloud, as she ate, bits of news from the paper, pausing to sip his own coffee and to cast an eye over the crowded room. Here and there an officer, gazing with too open admiration on Harmony's lovely face, found himself fixed by a pair of steel-gray eyes that were anything but humorous at that instant, and thought best to shift his gaze.
The coffee finished, the girl began to gather up her wraps. But the unknown protested.
“The function of a coffee-house,” he explained gravely, “is twofold. Coffee is only the first half. The second half is conversation.”