The eyes smiled at him with infinite promise.
“I think we’re going to like each other,” she said.
“I know one of us does already,” he grinned.
“You’re a dear,” she vouchsafed.
They saw each other every day after that. He managed to bring it about, either for luncheon or early [142] ]dinner or after the theater. At least he thought he was the one who brought it about. And as Naomi opened his impetuous notes, or the boxes that held great clusters of flowers ordered with awkward disregard of everything but quantity, the Eve-smile lifted the corners of her mouth and her eyes looked a trifle less tired.
Occasionally they drove out to the country for the day. But the countryside near New York rather amused him.
“It all seems sort of puny,” he would say as she sat with face carefully veiled from a too-revealing sun. “I’m used to snow peaks that touch the sky and trees so high that when you’re on the mountain trails above them, you look down and can’t see where they begin.” He turned from the inadequate hills to the more absorbing scenery of a woman’s face misted by a fluttering veil. “No, sir! When I come east, I don’t want this. I want New York—the excitement, the thrill of it. I want—you.”
It was said softly. His voice held the word like a caress and, looking up, she read in his eyes what she had read in many men’s—except that added to it was the new element of awe.
That new element became infinitely dear to her. She let him keep it. Except when their hands brushed accidentally—or so it seemed to him—they did not touch save for the clasp that helped her into a cab or expressed “good-night.” The warmth of his arms closed round her only in the dance. She met the light of his eyes with her own only across restaurant tables. No debutante could have held herself more aloof—perhaps not [143] ]quite so much so. But Naomi did not play the ingénue
. It was her world knowledge—world old—that fascinated him, that made her—as he had said—different.