"Those," he pointed out, "are the bare necessities. We can give up everything else."
She sat looking at him, playing absently with her pencil. After a while, she turned to her desk again, and, bending over it, began to make meaningless marks with her pencil on the yellow pad.
"What is the object," she said, "of trying to make me forget that I wouldn't be here at all except on business?"
"Do you think of that every minute?"
"I—must."
"It isn't necessary."
"It is imperative, Mr. Desboro—and you know it."
She wrote steadily for a while, strapped a bundle of notes with an elastic band, laid it aside, and turned around, resting her arm on the back of the chair. Blue eyes level with his, she inspected him curiously. And, if the tension of excitement still remained, all her high spirits and the indiscreet impulses of a gay self-confidence had vanished. But curiosity remained—the eternal, insatiable curiosity of the young.
How much did this man really mean of what he said to her? What did his liking for her signify other than the natural instinct of an idle young man for any pretty girl? What was he going to do about it? For she seemed to be conscious that, sooner or later, somewhere, sometime, he would do something further about it.
Did he mean to make love to her sometime? Was he doing it now? It resembled the preliminaries; she recognised them—had been aware of them almost from the very first.