“Don’t you?”
“I try not to—too much.”
“What?” he asked, swallowing the last morsel of cake.
She shrugged her shoulders:
“What’s the advantage of thinking?”
He considered her reply for a moment, her blue and rather childish eyes, and the very pure oval of her face. Then his attention flagged as usual—was wandering—when she sighed, very lightly, so that he scarcely heard it—merely noticed it sufficiently to conclude that, as usual, there was the inevitable hard luck story afloat in her vicinity, and that he lacked the interest to listen to it.
“Thinking,” she said, “is a luxury to a tranquil mind and a punishment to a troubled one. So I try not to.”
It was a moment or two before it occurred to him that the girl had uttered an unconscious epigram.
“It sounded like somebody—probably Montaigne. Was it?” he inquired.
“I don’t know what you mean.”