“You’re in the room next to me, aren’t you—the one who was playing?” she said, in a matter-of-fact tone, and her voice was gutturally pleasant, so different from the high-pitched excitement of the New Yorker that he stared at her in surprise.
“Yes; I’m just about twenty miles away,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Well, I suppose I’m letting myself in for a throw-down, but here goes. Honestly, I mean what I say. I’m stranded here—don’t know a soul. I’m just craving for some one to talk to. Fact. If you’re in the same box and can size a man up for what he is, why—” he added, in an embarrassed rush, aware by the white gleam of her teeth that the girl was watching him, amused at his embarrassment—“I say, what do you do to a man who has the nerve to knock on your door and ask you to go out to dinner?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, yes; that’s what I expected. Well, I meant it all right,” he said ruefully.
“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I’m going out to dinner.”
As she said this she seemed to relax, as though satisfied of the sincerity of his appeal, and, turning, for the first time the light fell clear across her face. What the color of her eyes was in the daytime he did not know, only now, in the darkness and the artificial light, there was something luminous and deep and full, and yet they struck him as a sort of barrier held against those who sought to read deeper. These eyes looked straight into his, quiet, restrained—not quite the eyes of a young girl nor yet the eyes of a woman. The whole swift impression on him was of some one quite unlike the rest, an inflexibility of purpose, something decisive in look and attitude and, at the same time, something withheld—a flash of elfin wildness cruelly mastered.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, conscious that he had looked too intently; and he added, in blunt tribute: “Yes, of course, you would be going somewhere.”
“I’m sorry,” she said; and this time she smiled, a smile like the woman, curiously devoid of coquetry and yet at the same time haunting the imagination.
“Do you mean you would have come?” he said eagerly.
“Of course,” she said, as though this were the most natural thing in the world.