"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"No."
Laurence lit a cigar, and laid his left hand on Mary's knee. The gently falling rain seemed to shut them in together, in a strange delicious quiet.
"Can you tell me, Mary, why it is that you feel so strongly about this place?... You've always lived here, why is it you don't want something new?"
"I don't like new things," she said, after a pause.
"You're a strange girl!... You don't seem like a girl at all, sometimes you seem about a thousand years old. I feel like a boy beside you."
"You are a boy," said Mary. From her tone, she was smiling.
"I would like to know where you get your air of experience, of having seen everything! It's astonishing!"
"Everything is everywhere," said Mary serenely.
"Now, when you say a thing like that! Upon my word! Where do you get it? I don't half like it, it doesn't seem natural!"