"Oh, Mr. Vane," he heard her saying, "do help me!" Their eyes met and he was conscious of a bewildering beauty in hers; it was with quite an effort that he did not, then and there, do something absurd and stupid. His hesitation, his astonishment, cost him a second or so; before he caught his composure again, she was explaining, sweetly, plaintively, "Help me to make up my mind. About a book."
"Why did you add that?" he asked, his wits sharp now, and his voice still a little unsteady. "There are so many other things I would like to help you in. A book? What sort of a book? One of those stories where the men are all eight feet high, and wear medals, and the women are all models for Gibson? Or one of those aristocratic things where nobody is less than a prince, except the inevitable American, who is a newspaper man and an abomination? Or is it, by any chance," he paused, and dropped his voice, as if he were approaching a dreadful disclosure, "poetry?"
She shook her head. The lilies in her hair nodded, and her smile came up like a radiance in that dark little corner. And, oh, the music in her laugh! It blew ennui away as effectually as a storm whirls away a leaf.
"No," she said, "it is none of those things. I told you I had not made up my mind."
"It is a thing you should never attempt. Making up the mind is a temptation only the bravest of us can resist. One should always delegate the task to someone else."
The girl frowned gently. "If it is the fashion to talk like that," she said, "I do not want to be in the fashion."
He took the rebuke with a laugh. "It is hard," he pleaded, "to keep out of the fashion. Everything we do is a fashion of one sort or another." He glanced at her wonderful hat, at the gown that held her so closely, so tenderly. "I am sure you are in the fashion," he said.
"If Mr. Orson Vane tells me so, I must believe it," she answered. "But I wear only what suits me; if the fashion does not suit me, I avoid the fashion."
"But you cannot avoid beauty," he urged, "and to be fair is always the fashion."
She turned her eyes to him full of reproach. They said, as plainly as anything, "How crude! How stupidly obvious!" As if she had really spoken, he went on, in plain embarassment: