“Just as you say. I shan’t talk. But I’m going to get you out of this, somehow, sometime. I can’t tell you where to reach me, to-night, except that Thornhill does, in a roundabout way. I’m going to locate in the East in a few days and you’ll hear from me. I’m going now. There’s no use talking, Moira, this pulls me down”—he made a gesture with his hand about the room and then added apologetically—“Don’t be offended. It’s just because it happens to be you.”
As he stood awkwardly, with hat and stick under one arm, he took out a long box of cigarettes and threw it on the table.
“At least let me give you those,” he said with a sheepish grin.
“Rob, please don’t worry about me,” she pleaded. She stepped toward the table to take a cigarette from the box he had thrown down, but his outstretched arm stopped her.
“Here,” he said, offering his opened case, “take one of these.... Moira, you’re the woman who makes all my conceptions about the sex go blooey. Damn it, I wish I were Harold. I wish I had some prior rights in the matter.”
“You’ve more rights this minute than Hal,” she said firmly.
After he had gone she sat puffing smoke into the dim upper reaches of the room, and watching the petals of candlelight waver and dip. What fun it had been! Life held strange meetings. Perhaps it held many more for her. She was a little unhappy, dissatisfied ... the place did look dismal, unclean, comfortless.
In the morning she found Miles pacing the studio waiting for her to rise. He was nervous and evasive, but in better shape than she had expected to see him. Obviously, he had done his recovering elsewhere, and bathed while she slept. She kissed him, her quarrel with him lost in pleasant afterthoughts of the night before, but he seemed troubled and strange. At breakfast, he suddenly asked:
“What the devil is this?”
“What?”