“Why should I be?” she asked, observing him calmly. He hesitated and paid much attention to his cigarette.
“Oh, no reason at all, I suppose,” he answered finally. He looked up in time to surprise a little mocking smile in her eyes. Nonsense! He’d show her that she couldn’t bluff him down like that! “To be honest,” he continued, “what I meant was that some folks take a dislike to their own names; in which case they are scarcely impartial judges.” He looked across at her challengingly. She returned the look serenely.
“So you think that is my name?” she asked.
“Isn’t it?”
“I don’t see why you should think so,” she parried. “I might have found it in a novel. I’m sure it sounds like a name out of a novel.”
“But you haven’t denied it,” he insisted.
“I don’t intend to,” she replied, the little tantalizing smile quivering again at the corners of her mouth. “Besides, I have already told you that my name is Clytie.”
He tossed the remains of his cigarette toward where one of the swans was paddling about. The long neck writhed snake-like and the bill disappeared under the water. Then with an insulted air and an angry bob of the tail, the swan turned her back on Ethan and sailed hurriedly back to her family.
“I understand,” he said. “I will try not to forget hereafter that this is Arcadia, that you are Clytie and that I am Vertumnus.”