A slight, rather vacant smile remained on his lips: he kept moving the lapel of his coat and inhaling the odour of a white clove-pink—one of a cluster that had stood in a little rose-bowl between Eris and himself at breakfast.
A pencil, dislodged, rolled over his pad and dropped onto the floor. He let it lie.
Neither work nor sleep attracted him. From the oddly pleasant sense of chaos in his mind always something more definite and more pleasant seemed about to take shape and emerge.
Whatever it was had delicately saturated him: all his being seemed permeated, possessed with the spell of it.
Time after time his mind mechanically began that day again, drifted through the sequence of events, minute by minute, leading him at length to where he now was seated,—but only to recommence again from the beginning.
About two o’clock he fell asleep, his boyish nose touching the clove-pink. When his head sagged to a more uncomfortable position he awoke, got out of his clothes and went to sleep in the proper place.
The first thing he did after he awoke was to unhook the telephone receiver:
“Is it you, Eris?”
Then a perfectly damning sequence of solicitous inquiries—the regulation and inevitable gamut concerning the young lady’s health, night’s repose, condition of mind, physical symptoms. Followed a voluntary statement regarding the day before and his intense pleasure in it; then a diffident inquiry, and a hope expressed that she, also, might have found the day not insupportably unpleasant;—surprise and pleasure to learn that she, too, had considered the day “wonderful.”